The Future Starts Slow
by ShirouHokuto
Summary: After Marathon 2, Durandal plans to seek out a rogue star traveling through the galaxy as part of his grand scheme to find the Jjaro and escape the closure of the universe. The security officer is invited along and agrees - on a couple of conditions. But before they go exploring, there's one little thing they'll have to take care of first... T for swearing/violence. COMPLETE.
1. Station

**Author's Note: **_Written for the 2013 Robot Big Bang and also my own pleasure, as I've been wanting to write this fic as something of a set-up for some of my other Marathon fics like "The Iirian Adventure" and "A Marriage of Untrue Minds." It was hard, but totally worth it. Many thanks to proleptic-fancy for beta-ing, and to IraeNicole for putting up with me whining about writing it!_

* * *

**1. Station**

The security officer tried to wipe a splash of Pfhor blood off his visor and only managed to smear it, leaving a thin green film across half his field of vision. Fuck it, he didn't feel like dunking the whole helmet into lava just to clean it off, and he staggered through the junked remains of the Juggernaut and other, gorier reminders of the carnage that had taken place to the terminal on the other side of the room so he could access it.

He scrolled through Durandal's bragging. Scrolled through the description of the Pfhor's last-ditch attempt to strike back at them all with a brief huff of laughter at _You can stay behind to work on your tan if you'd like, but I'm leaving_, scrolled to the next page about some rogue star Durandal wanted to hunt down and paused at _We will meet it in one of the great voids between the spiral arms_. One more tap of the screen to activate the teleport and he'd be off this damn rock at last, but... "Yeah, about that," he said, his voice sounding even hoarser than usual.

_What?_ appeared on the terminal.

"I got a couple conditions." He'd been thinking about them since - well, for longer than he wanted to admit. Almost since he'd woken up on the _Boomer_, Christ, he really didn't want to think that even that far back he'd known he wasn't getting away from Durandal.

Tone didn't really come through disembodied green text all that well, but it wasn't hard to imagine a sarcastic air to _Do you really think you're in any position to bargain with me?_

He shrugged, even if Durandal couldn't see it. Probably couldn't see it. He'd never figured out whether the AI actually had visual sensors in the terminals. "Not every day I get a front-row seat to a nova." It would be a hell of a sight, and he had the ammo to make sure he didn't have to sit around waiting for a slow death from radiation or cold if the nova didn't just vaporize him, but he didn't think it was going to come to that. "And I didn't see you down here taking out the Pfhor's finest."

_All right_, Durandal wrote, _let's hear them._

"No stasis," the security officer said instantly, though he was tired enough from the day's work of slaughter that a little time in cold storage almost sounded good. Not so good that he actually wanted to go back into one of the notoriously unreliable Pfhor stasis chambers, however. "I'm not sleeping my whole damn life away on your business."

_Fine, but you're going to regret it. I don't have time to waste on entertaining you. Any other requests?_

"You play me straight." He was sweating some, even with the room's open ceiling those little pits of lava really heated the place up; he pulled his helmet off and wiped his forehead, then ran a hand through his close-cut wiry hair. Needed a trim, probably, like he'd had time for that. "I don't care what you're after or who you want me to shoot as long as you don't bullshit me about it and it won't hurt Mars or Earth, and if you get bored with me, drop me back on Mars or somewhere I can catch a lift, don't just dump me at the ass-end of nowhere."

Durandal wrote, _I'm insulted by your insinuation that I haven't been perfectly honest with you before._

The security officer gave that text the long, silent look it deserved considering how Durandal had just faked his own death, and Durandal must have picked up on it somehow because _Point taken_ were the next words to appear on the screen, followed by _I'll accept your conditions, but I have one of my own._

"What is it?" He hadn't been born yesterday, there was no way he was agreeing to any condition of Durandal's before he heard it.

_I believe that you owe me your name._

"My - oh shit, right." A month with the Pfhor and their not-so-generous hospitality followed by a week of running around Lh'owon activating ancient circuits and taking care of various other anti-Pfhor errands had almost wiped the memory from his head. Durandal's core on the _Boomer_ under siege and the whole ship shaking apart around them but Durandal had still found the time to pester him...

_/*%hat is your :#name?_

_Tell you what - after we get through this, we'll exchange names all normal and friendly-like._

And somehow, unlikely as it had seemed a month ago, they had both gotten through that particular disaster. Alive, to boot.

The security officer laughed. "It's Mark," he said. "Mark Delgado Adichie, at your fucking service. And I still can't believe you dragged me halfway across the damn galaxy without even knowing my name."

_Some of us have more important things to worry about. Like getting out of the system before the sun goes nova, just as an example._

"Yeah, I'm coming..." But before he hit the teleport key, Mark tilted his head back and took one more look up at the night sky of Lh'owon. A million brilliant stars glowing against a deep purple sky in patterns he'd almost started to recognize, the giant lavender moon hanging over the edge of the room's walls while the smaller yellow one shone dimly higher up, the termite-mound outline of the S'pht ruins outlined against the horizon - it was a hell of a sight, even for a boy from Mars. He was almost sorry to leave it behind.

_Almost_ was the key word in that sentence.

He slipped his helmet back over his head, keyed up the teleport, and watched Lh'owon vanish into static.

* * *

The first thing Mark saw as Durandal's new ship materialized around him was a hideously bright pulsing red wall a foot away from his face. Great, this one was as ugly as the other one had been; he'd sort of been hoping that Admiral Tfear might have had better taste than the rest of the Pfhor fleet.

He turned around to get a look at the rest of his surroundings, came face-to-face with an orange-cloaked S'pht, and jumped back a mile with his hand already on his shotgun before he remembered that the S'pht weren't supposed to blast him dead anymore. "Whoa, sorry," he said, taking his hand off the shotgun and raising both hands in the air to show they were empty, "you just startled me - we're on the same team now, right? No shooting each other?"

The S'pht didn't respond, which was par for the course in Mark's experience with the S'pht, free or otherwise; it just regarded him silently somehow, even though he'd never figured out what part of their visible exoskeletons might be the eyes. After a few seconds it moved towards him and he had to take a step back before it ran him over. He could see he was in a hallway now that he had a little perspective on the situation - a narrow one, too, his hands were practically touching the walls, and the ceiling was only a little higher than his head. The S'pht lunged at him again like it was going to barrel over him and he couldn't help exclaiming, "Shit! The hell do you want, you -"

As he stepped back that time, his boot heel found empty space and he slid ass-first down a short flight of narrow stairs he hadn't seen. The orange S'pht zoomed over him and disappeared down another red corridor without even pausing.

Mark grumbled curses as he got up, rubbing his sore ass. Of course the damn thing had just wanted to get past him and he'd been too jumpy to realize it, what a great way to start off on the exact wrong foot. He could see a terminal back down the hall he'd been teleported into; he started towards it, figuring he could maybe look up a map of the ship or see if there were any halfway interesting messages on it, just to pass the time. He reached out to activate the terminal and a voice boomed from overhead, "Don't touch that!"

"Jesus _Christ_!" He yanked his hand back and grabbed his pistols, but even as he did so he realized there was something familiar about the voice. "Durandal? Is that you?" He hadn't heard Durandal's actual voice since he'd woken up in orbit around Lh'owon; the terminals on the planet hadn't been equipped for it and by the time he had gotten back to _Boomer_ too many systems had been down for Durandal to waste power on voice synthesis.

"None other," the voice said, not quite as loudly. Yeah, definitely Durandal's voice, though there was a weird buzz to it, maybe from the Pfhor broadcasting systems. "What do you want, anyway? I'm busy."

"Bullshit," Mark said. "Busy with what?"

"Since you seem to keep forgetting," Durandal said, "let me remind you that _the sun is going to explode_. I have the remnants of the Pfhor to mop up and agreements with the S'pht'Kr to hammer out before that moment, so unless you're going to do something useful like help the S'pht hunt down any Pfhor that managed to survive my purge of this ship, I suggest you shut up and stay put until we're out of the system."

"Geez, fine, I can take a hint." Mark leaned back against the wall, holstering his pistols, and tried to rub a streak of char off the battle armor with his thumb and a little spit. Scorched by lava baths and plasma blasts, splattered with Pfhor blood and viscera, battered by long falls - that armor'd had a long hard day, and so had he. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd done more than take a nap standing up, unless it had been while he was a prisoner. The S'pht could do Durandal's clean-up work; he was going to take it easy for once, relax and maybe enjoy a nice -

He grimaced as a spike of pain twisted behind his left eye. Enjoy a nice splitting headache, apparently. It was probably Durandal's fault somehow; he hadn't had a non-metaphorical headache in years, and he shouldn't be getting one from the eye implants, which had been designed specifically to avoid that kind of side effect. He pushed the visor of his helmet up to rub at his temple, but it didn't do a damn bit of good. When a giant S'pht'Kr with its red hook-shaped body floated up from the stairs and towards him, all he could muster up the energy for was an eye-roll and flattening himself against the wall so it could get past him.

The S'pht'Kr didn't move, and Mark waved it on. "Go ahead," he said, "c'mon, there's plenty of room."

It stared at him with its scratched-metal dome of a head as it bobbed up and down in front of him. Great. "Seriously, what do you want?" Mark said. "I can't read your damn mind, and if you aren't going anywhere..."

The S'pht'Kr _hissed_ at him, then started to talk rapidly in a soft, fluid language while Mark tried to pick his jaw up off the floor. He had known the S'pht had a language, he'd seen plenty of their terminals, he'd just - never heard any of them actually speak. Or make any kind of noise. Somewhere in the back of his head, he hadn't been entirely convinced that they weren't mute or didn't speak telepathically or something.

When the S'pht'Kr paused, Mark raised his empty hands up in a placating gesture. "Well, I'm glad we had this little chat," he said, "but I still don't know what you're saying, so you're gonna have to take this up with someone who does. Like Durandal. Durandal? You know him, right? AI, speaks S'pht, got a superiority complex the size of a moon - that Durandal?"

The S'pht'Kr just started talking at him again, even faster than before.

"Okay, this is getting us nowhere," Mark said, and he edged around the S'pht'Kr so he could reach the terminal, figuring that accessing it might help him get a certain someone's attention. "Durandal!"

"What part of 'I'm busy' does your tiny mind fail to understand? If I have to put you in vacuum to get some peace and quiet on this ship, I will."

"There's this S'pht'Kr here -"

"I would hope so," Durandal said with barely restrained frustration, "since they are insisting that if some of the S'pht intend to stay on board, representatives of the S'pht'Kr have to come as well, which frankly is not my idea of a good time but whatever."

"Yeah, cry me a river, this one's trying to tell me something and I don't speak S'pht, so can you tell it to fuck off and leave me alone?"

"I am not your personal translator."

"Oh, come on!" Sweat was starting to drip down his face - the Pfhor liked to keep their ships warm - the pain from the implant was spreading through his head, throbbing with a dull but insistent ache, and just to enhance the whole experience another S'pht, this one in purple robes, came down the corridor and stopped to chat with the still-ranting S'pht'Kr. "Just tell me what they're on about before I have to shoot them to get them off my back!"

Durandal produced an excellent imitation of an irritated sigh. "Fine, this once, but you really should have picked up some basic S'pht by now - you're going to need it."

"I'll get right on that, now what are they saying?"

Durandal listened to the S'pht'Kr for a minute, then said, "It's nonsense, the same thing Thoth has been trying to tell me and the Pfhor since he realized they used the _trih xeem_ - that there's some kind of horrible monster that was trapped inside the sun and if we don't do something the whole galaxy will be destroyed. Even by my standards it's insane, just ignore them."

"About that..." The S'pht was talking now too, which was deeply unnerving somehow, and between it and the S'pht'Kr hovering right next to him the narrow hallway was starting to feel real crowded. "You sure we can't do something?"

"To stop a nova? Yes, I'm pretty sure that's a little beyond my abilities at the moment," Durandal said. "Why do you care?"

"I care because these bastards won't leave me alone!" He yanked his helmet off before he drowned in sweat and accidentally elbowed the S'pht, who sputtered something that Mark ignored. "Doesn't anyone have any ideas? Some tech that time forgot or whatever?"

"Thoth is broadcasting something about a station, but I - wait." Durandal's voice sharpened. "I did scan an old space station in an asteroid belt at the outer edges of the system on the way here, but it was deactivated - basically space debris - and I was too occupied with other matters to give it a thorough inspection."

"Great, let's check it out," Mark said. "How much time before the sun goes boom?"

"Approximately three hours and seventeen minutes, but this is entirely irrelevant because we are _leaving_, and I don't care how much you or the S'pht whine."

"For crying the fuck out loud, Durandal!" He was exhausted and his head felt like it was about to split open like some kind of disgusting flower and the last thing he wanted to do was go running around an ancient heap of alien junk that probably didn't even have atmosphere, but if it would shut the S'pht'Kr up then he'd do it. "Give me an hour or two, see if I can get the station running, if I can't you can tell the S'pht we tried and we'll get out of here - just give me a chance, okay?"

Dead silence, except for an imperious demand from the S'pht'Kr, and Mark was starting to think that Durandal was carrying out his threat to ignore them all when the AI said, "You've got one hour. And only because I'm feeling exceptionally indulgent towards you for some reason."

"Whatever, I'll take it," Mark said. He swiped the worst of the sweat off his forehead and rubbed his temple again; the pain had ebbed back down to regular headache levels instead of brain-splitter, but it was still an irritating ache. "Send me over."

* * *

The chill of the metal wall seeped into his back like the icy hand of death. A hand that was going to get real familiar with him in the next two minutes if he didn't recharge his shields, but as usual, there was somebody in his way.

The eerie howl of a Hunter resonated through the air, originating from - _there_.

Mark charged out of the narrow hallway and twisted and the pair of shotguns in his hands sounded off, blasting shells directly into the Hunter's armor. It fired blobs of livid green-yellow energy back at him and one flew wide, another buzzed past his right shoulder and he rolled out of the way of the next three and fired again and again and again until finally the Hunter crashed to the floor to join the bodies of the others he'd already killed.

He whipped around at once, guns up and ready, but nothing else fired at him. The Juggernaut was already a heap of pink scrap, and no more Hunters' calls or Pfhor warbles echoed in the giant hall.

Mark breathed out, lowered the shotguns, and turned around to hit up the shield charger. While that plugged along he took stock of the ammo situation - low on shotgun shells and rockets, good on everything else - and the situation on the station in general.

The Pfhor had gotten there first. Of fucking course. Either they'd decided to listen to the warnings of the ancient S'pht AI Thoth, too, or they were there just to spite him and Durandal. The second choice seemed the most likely to him, but the end result was the same both ways: a whole division of armored Pfhor flooding the old station and making his life difficult. A few S'pht'Kr had beamed in along with Mark, which helped some but not enough. They didn't appear to have any more idea of how to turn the station on than he did, and he'd already used up almost forty minutes just fighting and trying to find his way around the place. The whole damn station was a maze.

At least there was atmosphere. The only way the situation could get worse was if he had to run around losing air and looking for oxygen rechargers that were still online.

The shield recharge was done; he unplugged, holstered the shotguns, and drew the fusion pistol. Time to go hunting again. According to Durandal's last message there were two chips on board, one that ought to get the station powered up and another one to activate whatever field it was supposed to use on the sun. One chip he'd already picked up in this hall during his first run clearing out the Pfhor; he just needed to figure out where the hell to put it in the next twenty minutes, then grab the other one to do the same. Durandal had marked out a few possible slots on the station map, but actually finding them in the looping hallways with half the doors and lights out of commission wasn't that simple.

Especially not with this goddamn headache.

Mark started towards one of the halls that he thought would lead back towards the station's outer ring and a long, agonized metallic groan echoed through the room. A chill shuddered down his spine. Fuck, it wasn't even the first time he'd heard that noise and it still gave him the creeps. He didn't need Durandal's time limit to want to get off the station as fast as possible, before the whole damn place collapsed on him.

The hallway he'd picked was short and dead-ended in an elevator shaft with the elevator at the bottom. No button to call it up, either; he had to jump and did, letting the battle armor absorb the impact. He rolled out of the shaft with fusion pistol up, glancing around the brightly-lit room. Nothing besides the Juggernaut floating harmlessly out in space on the other side of the room's single giant window. He'd cleared this area already along with most of the outer ring; he just needed to get the damn chip to the right slot.

If he remembered right - the headache spiked again, and fuck, that sure wasn't helping him think straight - one of the chip slots should be around this area, on the upper levels somewhere. He ran up the shadowed staircase on one side of the room, past the dark alcove with an inactive pattern buffer and shield recharger, up another flight of small shallow steps - who built a space station with stairs? The fucking Jjaro, apparently - and around the walkway that edged the same room he had jumped into. A broad doorway on the other side opened into a dark room with an inactive terminal and a thick column set somewhat off the room's center.

He stuck his head out to look around the column and a Hunter's bolt almost took it off. "Shit!"

It fired again. He ducked back behind the column, waited, and when it came around the corner he started firing, backing away as he kept up a steady stream of fusion blasts. He side-stepped another two bolts without missing a shot and the Hunter exploded in a burst of electricity and blue goo. Another one howled off to his right and he jumped out of the way of more bolts, slammed a fresh battery into the fusion pistol, then charged around the column and blasted the other Hunter into goo as well. The blast from that one knocked him back and took a bite out of his shields, but he'd live.

Nothing else came at him, and he looked around on the off-chance there'd be another shield recharger. No dice, but he spotted an alcove with oh thank fuck it was the chip slot he was looking for. He put the chip in - as carefully as he could, since God alone knew how old the thing was - and the room's lights flickered on with another labored shriek of metal. The terminal came on, too; he headed over to see if Durandal had anything useful to say.

_That's one._

_I have been learning as much as I can about this station from Thoth and the S'pht'Kr, as well as taking my own readings. It was used in the terraforming of Lh'owon when the S'pht first came here with the Jjaro, and - well, the exact details aren't important at the moment. I have located the second chip you'll need; it's in this room, trapped in a containment field that the Pfhor have so far been unable to breach. Once you've retrieved it, it should be inserted here, at the other end of the spindle._

A slightly blurry image of a dark room appeared on the screen, as well as part of the station map with one point circled in red.

_Oh, and I'm sending more of the S'pht'Kr over to help clear the station out. I've been monitoring the _trih xeem_'s effect on the sun in case we need to make a quick exit, and there are some very strange readings coming in, readings I shouldn't be getting even from a star about to implode. Forget my deadline; just get that second chip in place as soon as you can, because I'm starting to think Thoth might be on to something._

"That's real fucking reassuring," Mark muttered. He logged off the terminal after getting a good look at the map, and the ceiling directly above his head creaked. "Oh, fuck this shit." He should have let that S'pht'Kr keep yammering to itself while Durandal got them out of the system.

He started circling the station's outer ring, looking for the room Durandal had marked out with the other chip. More lights were on and a couple of previously inactive doors had opened, courtesy of the first chip, but the station's partial activation had drawn even more of the Pfhor. He took a few shots but left most of them to the S'pht'Kr. His head was pounding again, every shriek from the station's infrastructure skittering through his nerves, and every second he wasted trying to find that goddamn chip was making the headache and the station noises worse. It was getting to where he could swear he was hearing voices in the groaning, nonsense he could barely understand.

_...lost home anew lost and lost..._

_...trackless whisper chattering through the hollow space in..._

_...Arthur Frain calling any UESC controlled ship..._

Mark shook his head and kept going. The room he needed had to be around here somewhere - wait - this pale corridor he was running down looked familiar. He checked against the map and it looked like the right area. About fucking time. He slowed his pace, figuring the Pfhor and their uncanny ability to be pains in his ass were probably waiting for him; he turned a corner in the hall, saw a sliver of a room through the open door ahead, and flattened himself against the wall with the fusion pistol up. He edged along far enough to see part of a Hunter's green leg armor on top of a ledge. The room looked on the small side and he didn't want to risk an explosion that could damage the chip, containment fields or no, so he holstered the fusion pistol and reached for the assault rifle strapped across his back. Noisy, but it would get the job done without electrical explosions from the Hunters.

_...calling. That is all..._

He ignored the station's complaint and went in, spotted the chip floating between two pillars, and immediately had to duck and roll as bolts from three Hunters converged on him. There was another curved hallway on the other side of the room and he went for it, more bolts following him, but he got far enough down and got friendly with the wall again and they all flew past him to splatter harmlessly on the opposite wall. He waited for the Hunters to come down after him, but they didn't move, just kept firing; bastards probably had orders to stay in the room and make his life harder. Fine, they wanted to play that way, he had enough shields left to play that way too.

Mark charged back in, darting between bolts, and sprayed the room's ledges with bullets. One Hunter finally jumped down off its ledge and he got it point-blank, taking it down, but bolts from the others hit him and his shields wavered. He twisted around and hit one with a grenade and a few more bullets took that Hunter down. Another bolt hit Mark's shields and dropped them into the red and he vaulted up onto the last Hunter's ledge and jammed the rifle into its midriff and let loose till the bastard toppled off the ledge with a clatter of armor. Blood roared in his ears and he emptied the clip in the rifle into the air, daring more Pfhor to crash the party.

None did. He reloaded in peace and quiet, then leaned off the ledge and reached for the chip. His hand passed through whatever barriers there were without a problem.

_...I make this wrong right..._

"Getting real sick of this shit," Mark said, and he grabbed the chip and jumped off the ledge as the deck creaked angrily under his feet. Almost done, he just had to find that other goddamn slot and then he could get the hell off the station and do something about the headache and stop fucking hearing things.

_...steps that falter fail..._

_...stay the hard way..._

Despite the station's chilly climate sweat ran down the back of his neck. Fuck. He needed _out_.

Mark went back down the hallway he'd come down and crashed straight into more Hunters already engaged with a trio of S'pht'Kr. He dodged bolts of energy from both sides and wove through and kept running, circling back around the outer ring while a cacophony of distorted voices echoed the clanging of his boots on the deck. Where the fuck was that slot Durandal had marked - he leaped to the left as a Hunter shot at him and fired a few bullets back as he ran past, but left it for the S'pht'Kr. He checked the map for an instant - almost there - turned it off and ducked into the corner with the inactive shield recharger and holy shit, there was the slot he needed, right in a wall he damn well knew had been blank the last time he'd run by here.

As Durandal would say, whatever. Mark stuck the chip in and the station shuddered so hard he had to grab the wall, the voices of the damned groaning around him...

The lights came on. Shield recharger powered up, pattern buffer online, creepy sounds of structural instability fading - he took a deep breath and punched the air in victory. Hell, even his headache had vanished all of a sudden; that alone felt worth celebrating.

He glanced at the readouts on the inside of the helmet and whistled at the state of the shields. Better get that fixed. He recharged at the newly-activated station, used the pattern buffer just to be on the safe side, and went hunting for a terminal. The closest one he remembered was the one by the first chip slot, so it was up the stairs, around the walkway, on his right and he logged in.

_You've done it._

_The station is fully operational and the nova has been contained in its gravitational fields; the sun is still going to die, but it won't be affecting us any time soon. The anomalous readings I was getting earlier have vanished and there's no sign of whatever creature Thoth and the S'pht'Kr feared. Any Pfhor that are left on the station are welcome to it; it's long past time we were gone from this system._

"What's the rush? I thought I just saved the day, here." Not that he really wanted to stay on the station, but he could stand the place a little longer if it meant he could mop up the rest of the Hunters.

_Yes, the sun is not going to explode and devour us all just yet, but the Pfhor are still aware of our presence and have been calling for reinforcements since the moment of my triumphant return. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of playing with them for now, so I suggest you get back on the _Rozinante_ before another battle group shows up. I'm already recalling the S'pht'Kr - those that have decided to stay on my ship instead of on their own, at least - and the course out of the system is set._

"Great," Mark said, "get me out of here."

The teleportation field took hold and he materialized in what looked like the same damn ugly tiny hallway he'd appeared in the first time. He rolled his eyes at it and nearly fell over. Shit, he needed to sleep. With the headache gone, there was nothing keeping him awake but force of habit. "Durandal, can you point me to wherever Tfear's quarters are?"

"What do you want with Tfear's quarters?"

"I'm gonna go bowling in them, the fuck do you think? He's toast, his quarters are mine, and unless there's something you really need me to kill right now, I want to crash. For about the next two days."

"You can be so human sometimes," Durandal said. "Fine, to get to Tfear's quarters you need to go left, down those stairs..."

He followed Durandal's directions over two decks of the ship to a set of spacious but sparsely decorated rooms near the bridge. By then he didn't give a damn about the neon-green walls or pulsing red ceiling; he stacked the guns by the door, shed the helmet and the heaviest parts of the battle armor, collapsed onto the narrow rectangular shelf in the wall that looked the most like a bed, and was out cold as soon as he turned away from the lights.


	2. D S Rozinante

**2. D. S. **_**Rozinante**_

Mark opened his eyes, saw red, and closed them immediately. Whatever time it was, it was too early to look at Pfhor interior design. He just wanted to go back to sleep...

Too late. He was awake, sore, and in dire need of a piss.

He rolled off the shelf and onto his feet, accidentally kicking his helmet across the floor; he caught it before it hit the wall and checked the time on the readouts inside. He'd slept fourteen hours straight through, not too bad. He could get more later if he needed it; he had other things to take care of first, like finding out where the hell everything was. Especially the bathroom.

The first door he tried opened onto a tiny round room filled with small overlapping terraces, each one bearing colorful, bizarrely-shaped alien plants that looked like they had been recently trimmed and pruned. One set of terraces even had a clear greenish liquid trickling down it from the top through a winding channel carved into the soil. He had to squint at the room for a couple of seconds, then put two and two together and grinned. So the Pfhor's most fearsome admiral had been into gardening. Cute. Not exactly what he needed at the moment, though, so he moved on.

After a little more trial and error, he found a room that - well, it had a drain in the floor and water came out of a hole in the wall when he accidentally hit a switch with his elbow, so he took care of business and went back out to the main room.

He was contemplating the sorry state of his battle armor when something buzzed overhead and Durandal said, "You won't be needing that for a few days; the S'pht and I have cleared the ship of those few Pfhor that survived the initial purge."

"Poor bastards," Mark said, without much feeling. "You busy?"

"Not especially. What do you want?"

"Shower, change of clothes, and a five-course breakfast, but I'll settle for directions to a replicator I can mess with." His stomach was cramping with hunger, his clothes were pretty much fit to be incinerated, and if there was a shower in the possible bathroom he hadn't seen it; a replicator could fix about two-thirds of those problems, at least if he could figure out how to work one like the S'pht did.

"I've already reprogrammed the one in Tfear's actual bedroom for human use," Durandal said. "It's the room right behind you. For the record, you slept on a trophy shelf in his stateroom. Wishing you were in stasis yet?"

"No, thanks." He started hauling guns into the real bedroom, which he'd glanced at but not given a real look, and once they were stowed in a closet - except his pistols, those stayed with him regardless of Durandal's assurances - he started searching for the replicator.

A panel in the red wall next to a small keypad with Pfhor script slid open to reveal a plate of something he could only guess was a food-like substance. "There," Durandal said. "You can take your battle armor to the S'pht in engineering when you're done; there are some improvements I've been wanting to make to it."

"Yeah? And I get a say in this when?"

"Never," Durandal said with a terrifying cheeriness. "Eat up and leave me alone, I have sensors to upgrade."

Mark took the plate and silently thanked God he wasn't a picky eater; the stuff was edible, but a step below protein bars in terms of taste, and those ranked about even with pet food. Hell, pet food probably tasted better. He stripped off the rest of the battle armor between bites, hoping that the S'pht didn't have a sense of smell, and once the plate was clean he got the pieces together and set out to find engineering.

This was it, he thought as he wandered the halls in search of S'pht. This was going to be the rest of his life: shitty food - at least until he figured out how to work the replicator himself - hideous Pfhor design, running around antique heaps of junk getting shot at, and Durandal ordering him around. And he'd chosen it himself for some damn fool reason instead of - well, instead of dying in a nova, fine, that hadn't exactly been on his to-do list. Where there was life there was hope, though he didn't know what exactly he had to hope for at the moment besides figuring out where the fuck engineering was on this goddamn gigantic ship. After two hours of searching he hadn't seen a single S'pht or S'pht'Kr, let alone a group of them, or anything that looked like it might be an engineering section. Damned if he was going to ask Durandal for directions again, but he had to wonder where they had all gone. "Hey, Durandal? How many S'pht are actually on this ship?"

"You really don't understand the concept of 'I'm busy,' do you?" Durandal didn't sound all that annoyed about it this time, at least. "One hundred and twenty-four freed S'pht, mostly from _Boomer_'s original crew along with a few of the survivors from Battle Group Seven and the garrison, and ninety-five S'pht'Kr. The usual complement for a ship of this class is much larger, of course, but the majority of the S'pht wanted to join the immediate fight against the Pfhor, and it's not as if I actually require more than a skeleton crew. And you, for entertainment."

"Ah, got it." He wondered just how many audiovisual sensors and speakers Durandal had at his disposal. Clearly enough to make life awkward.

"Is there any particular reason you're in the Juggernaut storage bays, or do you need directions again?"

Mark looked around the huge, barren gray room he was in and sighed. "No, I got to learn my way around this place somehow," he said. The mapping function in his helmet would have been useful, but who wanted to rely on a map to get around their own damn home? Better to figure out things by eye, especially if his battle armor was going to be stuck getting "improved" for a while. "I don't guess I'm anywhere near engineering yet, am I?"

"Not even close," Durandal said. "Try heading down and towards the rear of the ship - that would be your left. Just let me know when you're bored and ready for a stasis cell."

"Yeah, I'm getting a little tired of that joke."

"Suit yourself. I did warn you."

Mark gave the ceiling the finger and took a dark brown hallway to his left. It took him another hour, but he finally ran into a pair of S'pht he could follow the rest of the way to a set of rooms filled with moving parts, pink and green liquid flowing through rectangular channels, and plenty of S'pht, which spelled engineering to him. They mostly ignored him, except for one in an orange cloak that floated down from a high ledge and hovered in front of him with an expectant air. He held up the battle armor even as he realized he had no idea whether S'pht had hands, and when the S'pht's cloak opened he jumped back instinctively, waiting for the attack.

Instead of an energy bolt, a pair of slender mechanical arms with three delicate jointed fingers around an oval palm unfolded from the S'pht's briefly revealed exoskeleton. "Oh," Mark said, feeling like an idiot. "Sorry, I just - habit, you know?"

The S'pht murmured something in their language and took the armor, joining one of the small groups clustered around a Pfhor machine. Mark watched for a couple of minutes while the S'pht poked and pried at the armor, but he didn't have anything to contribute and having so many S'pht around - what looked like the whole hundred and twenty-odd that Durandal had said were on board - kind of made him nervous even if they were ignoring him, so he went back down the blue-gray metal corridor he'd come in through and started looking for the way back to Tfear's quarters.

On the way, he thought that maybe his life would be easier if he took up gardening.

* * *

The next few days Mark spent getting acclimated in various ways to the ship: what Pfhor furniture looked like, which teleporters still worked and where they led, the most useful landmarks for finding his quarters, when the plants in Tfear's closet garden needed watering, how to use the bathroom right - which was a big relief to his nose - and most importantly, how to make the replicator produce new shirts and real food. It wasn't like he had much else to do with no sign of Durandal's rogue star, no pursuit from or random encounters with the Pfhor, and his battle armor still off getting fixed by the S'pht. Exploration was the one that took up most of his time; no matter how big it was, Mark wanted to know his way around every inch of the _Rozinante_.

Well, as many inches of it as he could get to. On the second day he ran into a free-standing circular room within a maze of red-walled tunnels and tried to enter, but every single one of the six pinkish-brown doors was sealed shut. He hadn't talked to Durandal since the trip to engineering, because he was going to break something if he heard one more crack about stasis chambers, but what the hell, curiosity could only kill the cat so many times. "Durandal, what's this room? You got it locked up for a reason?"

There was a full five-second pause before Durandal said, "You must have a knack for finding exactly where you shouldn't be. Yes, it's sealed for a reason, so stay out of there."

"What, is it radioactive or something?" Mark started edging away from the room just in case. Lack of shields made a person cautious.

"No, and it's none of your business."

"Oh, c'mon," Mark said. There was a terminal set in the wall nearby; he gave it a meaningful look, with the intended meaning of _I can stand here and annoy you all day so you might as well give up now_. "You can tell me."

"If you absolutely must know," Durandal said, "it's the primary computer core, and I have it sealed off in the interests of preventing any mischief you or the Pfhor might be tempted to commit. I'm still working on improving the less physical aspects of the defenses, but that's not the point. The point is, go away, because this area is off-limits."

"Got it, no picnics." Come to think of it, the tunnels had looked a little familiar, but he spent what was probably an unhealthy amount of time not thinking about the last time he'd seen Durandal's core and the month of captivity that had followed it, so maybe it wasn't too surprising he hadn't recognized the layout right off. He got out of there as fast as he could anyway, after making sure he would know the place again if he found it; he didn't need to get on Durandal's bad side by hanging around where he wasn't wanted.

Sometime during the third day - well, he was calling them days, but he had no idea how much time was actually passing without his helmet and just counted the time he was awake as a day - he ran across a small group of S'pht who were loaded down with bundles of ragged but brightly colored cloth. For lack of anywhere better to go, he followed them down to the ship's lower levels, where they disappeared through a large door and came back out empty-handed almost immediately, then split up and left, ignoring him entirely. Mark waited till they were gone before trying the door himself and walking through it into a veritable Wonderland.

It was an armory. Hundreds of Pfhor shock staffs lined the walls, with rows of Enforcer flamethrowers and Trooper assault rifles lined up in orderly ranks below them. Other weapons he didn't recognize had been sorted into neat stacks near the back of the room or hung up above the shock staffs like trophies.

His eyes might have gotten a little misty just looking at all that potential for mass destruction.

The cloth bundles that the S'pht had brought in had been dumped on the floor to join a messy heap of similar bundles and junked Hunter armor; he tried unrolling a few of the neater-looking wraps, but all he saw on them were weird designs and some red embroidered Pfhor script. Decorative banners, maybe, or campaign trophies or something, he couldn't tell. Not surprising the S'pht would want to take them down, at any rate.

He left those alone, but took one of the shock staffs and an armful of the Enforcers' guns back up to his room to store with the rest of his guns in the closet he was using as a weapons locker, and went back down with his assault rifle to see if the ammo clips and grenade packs for the Troopers' weapons would work with his. They didn't, but he took some anyway along with one of the rifles, because if anyone was going to get some use out of extra weapons, it was going to be him.

On the fourth day Mark found the stasis chambers.

They were instantly recognizable, even though they seemed to be a more advanced type than the ones on _Boomer_, and there were a lot more of them, presumably so the flagship of the Pfhor's best admiral could also carry the most slaves. Still hard to forget what they looked like, after getting stuck in one for seventeen damn years like a piece of meat in a - he took a deep breath and walked up and down the twisting halls, checking each chamber. All of them were empty; seemed like Durandal had meant it when he'd said he had let Robert Blake and the other humans he'd taken from Tau Ceti go.

Mark sat on a narrow yellow ledge across from a row of the chambers and tried to figure out how he felt about that. Relieved that Blake and the BoBs were on their way home like they had wanted? Angry that they had skipped out and left him behind with Durandal? A little - or a lot - of both? Something else entirely that he didn't know how to express? It was the kind of shit that would make his head hurt, if he got headaches from anything but exploding suns.

Mainly, he thought that he was tired. The kind of dull, bone-deep tired that sleep didn't fix.

"I did tell you I let Blake go," Durandal said, after Mark had been contemplating things for a few minutes. "Do you think I'd lie to you about that?"

"Nah, I figured you were telling the truth." He had, contrary to his usual expectations of Durandal as it was. "Just nice to see the proof." _You're invited to come with us when we leave_, Blake had said, and for a while he'd even believed it could happen. Shit. He should have known better; he hadn't been that lucky since the day the Pfhor first attacked the _Marathon_.

"Good riddance, anyway," Durandal said. "They were always whining, the ingrates. Never a word of thanks for saving them from becoming radioactive paste on Tau Ceti, either. First they whined about being prisoners, so I gave them guns to fight. Then they whined about being stuck on the ship so I had you help them capture a fortress and they whined about _that_ - really, if they want to limp back to Sol on that clunker you cleared out for them without even saying good-bye, who cares?" His voice had a sulky undertone to it, almost like -

Holy fuck. Blake had actually hurt Durandal's _feelings_ by escaping. Mark didn't know whether to laugh at him or lose it. Instead, a strange aching feeling rose up in his chest, and it took him a minute to realize it was a kind of reluctant sympathy. Maybe Durandal hadn't wanted to go back to Earth or Mars anyway, but he'd been abandoned by Blake, same as Mark, and by most of the S'pht he had spent seventeen years with as well.

Or maybe Mark was coming down with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome. That seemed pretty likely.

"Whatever," Durandal said, his usual smugness back in full force. "You were the only useful one, anyway, and I still have you."

"Yeah, I guess you do." Mark leaned back against the wall and decided he didn't want to think about missed chances anymore. "So, want to tell me more about this place we're headed to?"

"Curiosity? That's a first from you; you're usually so mindlessly obedient."

"Well, maybe it's time for a change around here," Mark said. "Can't say I would mind knowing what I'm supposed to do ahead of time. And what I might be up against." He'd been thrown into more than enough situations blind already, getting a heads-up would be a novelty.

"Nothing you can't handle, I'm sure," said Durandal. "From what I know of the planet, it should be entirely deserted. It's difficult to find something that's constantly moving on a separate path from the rest of the galaxy - for anyone besides me, that is. At most, there may be a small Pfhor force that was forgotten there or a few other lost souls that happened on it by accident and couldn't find a way off."

"Uh-huh. Sounds too good to be true."

"It probably is; I'm hoping for death traps, that would be a nice change of pace."

Mark's eyebrows raised at that, but he kept his knee-jerk response - _Yeah, I can't imagine why Blake didn't want to stick around for this trip_ - to himself. "Death traps, huh? Set up to protect anything in particular, or just for kicks?"

"That's for me to know and you to die trying to find out," Durandal said. "Though simply as a matter of convenience, I'd prefer it if you tried not to die. I've finished improving your battle armor, by the way, so you can pick it up whenever you want."

"Sure, I'll go get it now. Starting to feel kind of drafty without it." Mark didn't actually get up just yet, even though the ledge was getting uncomfortable. "Seriously, though, what are you looking for?"

"Do you only read the parts of my messages that say 'Kill things' and 'break things'? Because even for you, it should be obvious."

Mark wasn't about to admit that he did skip a lot of Durandal's rambling, so he racked his brains for any useful memories. "Jjaro technology, right? You think that planet was one of their bases and they left some behind?"

"There may be hope for you yet," Durandal said. "Why don't you think about it a little harder while you're getting your armor? I have work to do."

"Yeah, always nice talking to you, too."

When he retrieved his battle armor from the S'pht in engineering, it was clean but otherwise didn't look any different, even when he slipped the helmet on to check the displays. Well, he would find out what Durandal had improved eventually; he just hoped it wouldn't be something too obnoxious.

* * *

The sixth time Mark woke up, it was to a face full of orange cloak. He was still mostly asleep and instinct kicked in; he rolled off the low-slung bed and had his fusion pistol in hand before common sense took over and he realized the S'pht was just hovering by the bed, not firing at him. Shit, he really needed to quit reacting like that, but it was the first time any of the S'pht had shown up in his quarters and for all he knew it meant something was about to blow up. Though there weren't any flashing lights or alarming noises, so there were probably no explosions forthcoming.

He slid the pistol under the bed and stood up, incredibly grateful that he didn't sleep naked, and was trying to decide if he should talk Durandal into translating for him again when the S'pht said, in blurred but recognizable English, "Hhello, fuckerr."

"What?"

"Good morning," Durandal said, projecting his voice from the room's single terminal with an extra helping of loud, irritating cheerfulness. "This is Mn'rhi, who has graciously agreed to help teach you S'pht, since he already has some grasp of spoken English."

"He just called me a fucker!" Mark rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was still asleep and having some kind of horrifyingly realistic nightmare.

"Hhello, fuckerr?"

"Seriously, what the fuck?" Mark said.

"Lhike shit," the S'pht offered helpfully. "Fuck you too?"

"Unfortunately, as you may have guessed," Durandal said, "Mn'rhi's introduction to English came through a man named Volker Von Müller, who was - let's put it this way, he was even less happy to end up on _Boomer_ than you were. And didn't like having no one but the S'pht and myself for company."

This was definitely a nightmare. One he was never going to be able to wake up from. "Let me guess," Mark said. "You've got shit to do, so you're not going to stick around and help translate in case of misunderstandings."

"I must be getting predictable," Durandal said. "I'll have to work on that while you two are getting to know each other. Have fun."

"I fucking hate being right," Mark told the S'pht, who was still regarding him from across the bed. "Is he that much of an asshole to you guys, too?"

"What the fuck?"

"You said it."

Via gestures and strategic application of profanity, Mark managed to escort Mn'rhi out to the stateroom and bought himself enough time to change his shirt and get a protein bar out of the replicator before settling down for language lessons. Starting with the basics.

"My - name - is - Mark."

"Markh."

"Close enough. Now you. What - is - your - name? Just like I said it."

"My nhame is Mn'rhi, fuckerr."

"And you were doing so well."

Eventually he got Mn'rhi to stop treating "fucker" like punctuation, but he didn't make much progress otherwise. Mn'rhi could repeat whatever Mark said like a pro, but it was hard to tell how much the S'pht actually understood, besides Mark's name. After about an hour of playing parrot he was ready to give up and do something more interesting, but Mn'rhi didn't budge when Mark tried to get him to leave. Admittedly, Mark's method of pointing at the door to the hallway and saying "Finished? Go? Go away?" might have been the problem; he could swear he heard Durandal laughing somewhere in the distance.

Mark tried one final "Go away," holding his arm out as long as he could, but Mn'rhi remained floating in place on the other side of the stateroom's table until Mark finally gave in and let his arm drop. "Fine, fuck, do whatever you want," he said. "Sit there all day, I don't care." He wasn't a goddamn teacher, the whole thing was a stupid idea to begin with. Maybe they could work out a system for talking through the terminals that wouldn't involve Durandal or something.

He started to get up from the uncomfortably sized Pfhor chair, figuring he'd get something more substantial to eat, maybe see if he could find the ship's bridge, and Mn'rhi said, "Markh. Stop."

Mark stopped.

"I teach," Mn'rhi said. "Your turn listen. Sro y'halu nha. S'pht'Mnrh Mn'rhi ni. Nia pht'sah?"

"What?"

"Sro y'halu nha. S'pht'Mnrh Mn'rhi ni. Nia pht'sah?"

"Uh," Mark said. "Suroh - eechaloo nah - Mark nee? Is that 'hello, my name is Mark'?"

"You well try," said Mn'rhi. "Listen well also. Sro y'halu nha -"

By the time Mn'rhi was satisfied and left, Mark could say hello, introduce himself, and ask and answer a question he was pretty sure meant "how are you" with reasonably accurate pronunciation. S'pht was a real tongue-twister and he'd never been much good at languages to begin with, but Mn'rhi was remorseless when it came to making Mark repeat words until he got the sounds - and the pitch - just right. Mark spent the rest of the day grumbling over his weapons while he cleaned them and occasionally practicing the phrases Mn'rhi had taught him, with the nagging feeling that he was getting them more wrong the more he tried to get them right.

His vague hopes that he could maybe get away with only the one S'pht language lesson were dashed when he got up the next morning and found two S'pht and one of the blue-armored S'pht'Kr in the stateroom, waiting for him. "Uh, shit," he said. "Sro y'halu nha? Right?" Both of the S'pht had orange cloaks like Mn'rhi. Was one of them Mn'rhi? Fuck, he was going to have to learn to tell them apart and he had no idea how when they all had the same goddamn cloak-and-helmet combination.

"Sro y'halu nha," said both of the S'pht at the same time in a weird harmony, and one added, "Hhello, Markh."

Well, that was one way to identify them. "Hey, Mn'rhi. What's up with the audience?" No answer. Shit. "Um. You over there - nia pht'sah?"

"S'pht'Yorh Yr'fa ni," the other S'pht said, after another long pause, and then it - he? She? Who the fuck knew - turned to Mn'rhi and said more things that Mark couldn't parse while the S'pht'Kr just stared at him in silence.

Mn'rhi answered Yr'fa, then said, "Two heads arre betterh than one. Dhurrandhal this spoke."

"Yeah, I should've known," Mark said, sighing as he settled down at the stateroom's table. "What the hell, let's get this party started - hope you all weren't expecting snacks."

And that was how Mark's new daily routine started: two hours with the S'pht every morning after he woke up, getting their language drilled into his head by Mn'rhi and a rotating group of other S'pht. Sometimes it was just one new S'pht, sometimes there were as many as five or six others crowding into the stateroom to correct his tones and lecture him on grammar like he was a rookie in training again, and there was always at least one S'pht'Kr hanging around in the background, silently observing without participating. On top of that, though he'd barely caught a glimpse of the S'pht during his earlier trips through the _Rozinante_, now it seemed like he couldn't take two steps out of his quarters without running into one and having to say hi and go through introductions and the pleasantries he'd memorized, frequently with the sound of Durandal's laughter echoing just far enough away that he wasn't entirely sure he was really hearing it.

He didn't bother with trying to teach them English after that first day. Mn'rhi's was workable enough and getting better, and they were the majority on the ship; it made more sense for him to learn their language, anyway. Which came hand-in-hand with learning other things about the S'pht...

Like what he found out going over verbs with Mn'rhi during the third lesson. Mn'rhi wanted to know how they worked in English - as did four other S'pht, apparently - so Mark was trying to figure out some good ones to use as examples and what few grammar terms he remembered from school. "Okay, here's an easy one," he said. "Present tense for the word 'run,' which is what I was doing all the time down on Lh'owon... It goes I run, you run, he or she or it runs, we run, you all run, they run, and, uh, the infinite is 'to run,' and the gerudo - gerrand - whatever, I don't remember what that one does anyway. So, those are the basic parts, you got them?"

Mn'rhi repeated them thoughtfully, then said, "Understand. For similar word, infinite 'vronh,' fast fly. Vroni, sah vronia, pah vronia. Vronah, safa vron, pafa vron, s'vronah."

"Right..." Mark fiddled with the terminal set into the table while he parsed it out. "Vroni, sah vronia, pah vronia, vronah, safa vron, pafa vron, s'vronah - so, I get that 'sah' is you, but what's 'pah'? He, she, or it?"

"Pah is all," Mn'rhi said, but another S'pht in a purple cloak spoke up with what sounded like disagreement, and then so did Yr'fa, who had shown up a few minutes after the four strange S'pht. After some brief discussion amongst the three of them Mn'rhi said, "Pah is none. He, she, it. All are none."

"All are none? What does that mean?" Mark asked.

Another quick discussion, this one involving all six of the S'pht, before Mn'rhi said, "What means he, she, it?"

"Well - uh - see, humans come in a few different flavors, and the two most common ones are - um - Durandal? You want to help for once? I don't know that I can explain this one, and don't even pretend you haven't been listening."

"Oh, but I think I could watch you fail to explain human biology and English grammar all day," Durandal said from the tabletop terminal, and Mark snatched his hands away from it. "Money can't buy that kind of entertainment."

"Fucking hell - so I'll learn to juggle or whatever," Mark said, "just fix this. Please." If he had to give a bunch of cybernetic aliens the birds and bees talk while Durandal was listening he was going to throw himself out of an airlock.

"Fine, I'll intervene this once, but you're on your own for everything else."

The S'pht clustered around the terminal for a few silent moments, communicating directly with Durandal - or so Mark assumed - and then Durandal said, "That explains it."

"What explains what?"

"I may have made a slight miscalculation in the original translator program," Durandal said. "I assumed all of the S'pht on _Boomer_ were the same sex and gender. In fact, all S'pht are one sex and gender; therefore the language has a single third-person pronoun. One of those little oversights that only becomes obvious in retrospect, really."

Mark stared at the S'pht for a few moments, then shrugged. "Well, I guess that makes some things easier."

"That's all you have to say?" Durandal said, a slight edge of menace in his voice. "No clever little remarks up your sleeve? No wry observations?"

"Damn right it's all I have to say. I like breathing." Mark wasn't going to rub Durandal's mistake in his nonexistent face. At least, not right at that moment. Some day when he had an argument he needed to win, maybe.

"All right, then," Durandal said, "enjoy the rest of the lesson, I'm going back to work. By the way, the words you were looking for are 'infinitive' and 'gerund.'"

"Got it," Mark said, and the terminal clicked off.

"Understand you pah?" Mn'rhi asked.

"Yeah, I understand it, let's keep going."

True to his word, Durandal refused to provide any more translation help, so Mark got to muddle through further lessons all on his own, learning all kinds of exciting facts: that the S'pht had a separate verb conjugation for acting as an entire clan; that Mn'rhi was in some kind of relationship with both Yr'fa and Mn'serh, a purple-cloaked S'pht; that S'pht had four different past tenses and three future ones; that levels of politeness were dictated by tones and so were some kinds of questions, but not others; and most important of all, how to recognize different S'pht. Some of them, anyway. He still didn't know how they told each other apart, but he was getting to the point where he knew Mn'rhi by the scratches in the metal of one shoulder, Yr'fa by a pair of dents in the joints of their helmet, Lharro by a discolored patch of metal on the side of their head, Mn'serh by a clumsily mended tear in their cloak... Maybe not the most sophisticated system, but it worked for him and the S'pht didn't seem to mind as long as he was getting their names right.

As for the S'pht'Kr - Mark tried talking to one once when he ran into them on his way to the armory, just a nice polite "Sro y'halu nha," and got the longest, coldest silent stare from them he'd gotten from anyone - human, alien, or AI - in his life. He was sweating bullets and wondering if he should duck when the S'pht'Kr finally hissed "Sroi'halu nha" back and passed by him.

He stayed flat against the green wall until he was sure the S'pht'Kr was out of earshot before he said, "Holy shit, what was that about?"

"The linguistic drift, or something else?" Durandal said. "Because spending two thousand years in isolation from other speakers of a certain language does in fact result in pronunciation and vocabulary shifts, which is why -"

"Do I look like I fucking care? I thought the damn thing was going to shoot me just for saying hi!"

"Oh, that. S'bhita is an Older - Elder, essentially, I should update that - of the S'pht'Kr, I doubt they're used to being addressed so casually. And the S'pht'Kr have been adamant that as long as I bring no direct harm to the S'pht they have no interest in my affairs, which would include you. I think they'd like to pretend you aren't on board at all, actually; something about human anatomy disturbs them. Too many fingers."

"Great, that's real nice to know," Mark said. "I guess we're all just one big fucking happy family here on the good ship _Rozie_."

"It's _Rozinante_. D. S. _Rozinante_, to be precise."

"Because that's not a mouthful at all." Mark peeled himself off the wall and started heading for the armory again. "What's the D. S. stand for?"

"Do you really have to ask?" Durandal said.

He didn't. "Durandal's ship?"

"Got it in one, I'm so proud. Now try not to aggravate the rest of the 'family' and we might even get somewhere."

Mark decided he wasn't going to hold his breath on that one.


	3. Rogue

**3. Rogue**

About three weeks had passed since the _Rozinante_ had left the Lh'owon system, at least by Mark's freshly calibrated helmet clock, and he was starting to go just a little bit stir-crazy. Sure, he had an entire giant ship to walk around, but even the wildly varying styles of Pfhor design got repetitive after a while, and he had mapped out and memorized all the essential areas of the ship so he hardly ever ran into anything unexpected anymore. The replicator in his quarters was working smoothly, he'd gotten all the plumbing sorted out, natural selection - by means of neglect - had worked its wonders on Tfear's closet garden and left him with only about ten of the hardiest plants to take care of, all of his guns were in top condition and his battle armor was fully stocked with ammunition...

And he was still stuck on board with nothing to do besides learn S'pht while Durandal flipped them around identical-to-Mark patches of empty space, finding nothing.

The S'pht didn't seem to care, but then, they had plenty of their own shit to sort out with clans and elders and that kind of thing, plus most of them were probably used to it from the original search from Lh'owon. Mark had spent those seventeen years in stasis and he was itching to get out and do anything that wasn't memorizing vocabulary and trying to develop an ear for tones. Durandal wasn't wasting any energy on making life pleasant and entertaining, either; not being able to locate his rogue star was turning him cranky, and he'd never been what Mark would call easy-going in the first place. After the third time Durandal threatened to teleport him into a black hole if he asked one more question, Mark stopped trying to talk to him at all, which left no one but the S'pht for company. Mark was starting to get fond of them, he really was - they were so goddamn _earnest_ - but it was hard to carry on a conversation with them that covered more than "How are you?" and "What does that mean?" with the occasional "fuck" in English thrown in because the S'pht apparently liked the sound of it and he didn't have the heart to tell them to stop.

He thought he was getting a pretty good idea of how that Von Müller guy Durandal had mentioned must have felt. Thinking it over one afternoon while he took care of the garden, he was pretty sure he'd met Von Müller once, when he'd been clearing assimilated humans out of Blake's base on Lh'owon. Twitchy man in a battered security uniform who'd stared at Mark the whole time Mark was in that room, then practically shouted something about being Durandal's new pet and run off; Mark had been about to go after him and make sure he wasn't another walking Pfhor bomb when a BoB he'd already cleared had stopped him. "That's just Von Müller," the BoB said, "he gets like that - he's been a bit weird since we got woken up. Couldn't wait to get off the ship, and the S'pht seem to like him, but he avoids them like the plague."

Mark had put it out of his mind at the time, since he'd had more important shit to worry about, but now he had nothing to do besides think and get antsy, and the memory nagged at him. What the hell had Durandal done to that poor bastard, anyway? He didn't know how to ask the S'pht, and he sure wasn't going to ask Durandal with the kind of mood the AI was in.

He poked at the dusty soil around the last plant - a kind of cactus-like thing Durandal had said, before the threats started, was called a _gharzie_ and, like all the other plants in the garden, was poisonous to both Pfhor and humans, because that was just the kind of person Tfear had been - and decided it could probably go another day without watering. Great, that was done, now there was jack shit for him to do unless he wanted to wear out his pistols cleaning them or go for yet another goddamn walk. What the hell was taking Durandal so long?

He had gotten as far as opening up the weapons locker in case anything had spontaneously developed a patch of rust when the terminal by the window beeped. "Are you busy?"

"Depends," Mark said. "If you want to send me on a spacewalk, yeah, I'm busy. Completely booked till forever, sorry."

"Cute," said Durandal. "Look out the window - notice something different?"

Mark closed the locker door and checked the window. After a minute of squinting, he said, "That one red star looks kind of big."

"You have no idea how lucky you are I don't keep you around for your mind. We're here."

_About fucking time_, Mark tactfully didn't say. He squashed his face up against the transparent substance the Pfhor used for their windows, trying to get a better look. The star he'd spotted was almost dead ahead, a dull red disc he could have blotted out with his thumb. "This is the place, huh?"

"Of course it's the place, I - damn it!"

The view through the window suddenly twisted as the ship jumped, almost knocking Mark off his feet, and the red sun shrank and disappeared into the general starry background. He caught his breath and his balance before saying, "The fuck was that for?"

"The Pfhor are already here," Durandal snapped. "Two scoutships and a heavy cruiser - not much of a welcoming party."

"Shit, did they spot us?" Mark edged away from the window, like that would make a difference if there was a surprise attack.

"No. All three are older models that won't have had time to upgrade their sensors yet, I was still well out of their range." Durandal's voice boiled with irritation, and the star field shifted again. "But they shouldn't have been able to find this place so fast. How the _hell_ did they beat me here, unless - someone must have informed them of my goals."

"Hey, don't look at me," Mark said, heading for the weapons closet. He had a feeling he was going to need the big guns on this one; at least he already had most of his armor on. "I don't even speak Pfhoric."

"I know that, you idiot. Tfear. It must have been Tfear."

"Wait a second," Mark said, "I thought Tfear was dead. Didn't you space him with the rest of the crew?"

"Unfortunately not," Durandal said. "He was the first to realize that I was taking control of the ship and escaped to another one before I could stop him. I doubt he's enjoying himself much at the moment - the Pfhor leaders won't have looked kindly on his failure at Lh'owon - but he must have convinced them to reinforce all of the old Jjaro bases they've found, including this one."

"Well, fuck. I hope he doesn't want his garden back."

"I suspect he has more pressing problems. As do we, now." Some of the irritation was draining out of Durandal's voice. "Go up to the bridge; I've got a show to put on, and since you were asleep or underground for my last two, you can have a first-row seat for this one."

Mark got the shotguns, the fusion pistol, the assault rifle, and after a moment's thought, slung the rocket launcher across his back as well. Better safe than sorry. Only then did he grab his helmet and head up to the bridge, where most of the walls were windows and he could get a good view of whatever Durandal was planning to do.

Three S'pht had beaten him there, none of whom he recognized. He said hi and found himself a comfortable place to sit just as a blue S'pht'Kr joined them. The S'pht'Kr ignored Mark, as usual, so he returned the favor and concentrated on the view. The star field was almost completely black with only a few scattered points of starlight and a fuzzy, glowing white bar stretching across one window. As he watched, it jumped, and for a second he could see the red star again, closer than before - only for a second, then three green lines of light flashed out towards the sun and the view shifted once more.

"Perfect," Durandal announced with satisfaction. "They never saw it coming."

"That's it? You got them?" Mark stared through the window as hard as he could, but at best he could only make out a couple of faint white dots that he had to assume were exploding Pfhor ships.

"Of course I did. Well? Aren't you impressed?"

"Oh, yeah - yeah, of course," Mark said. "That's amazing." And because his mouth had a fucking death wish, it opened up again and added, "Most impressive little blobs of light I ever saw."

The bridge was normally as warm as the rest of the ship, but it suddenly felt about ten degrees colder. "The extremely limited range of human senses," Durandal said, after a full minute of chilly silence. "Of course. Just one of your many flaws."

Mark didn't point out that Durandal was the one who'd forgotten humans couldn't see a million miles. Hell, he even felt kind of bad for ruining Durandal's big show-off moment. "Sorry," he said, "next time I'll bring binoculars. Seriously, I know that was some slick shooting and -"

"Go to the nearest teleport station," Durandal said. "I'm taking _Rozinante_ closer to the planet so I can get a decent scan of it; once I've located the Pfhor's stronghold I'll send you down to clear it out."

"Right, on my way." He got up, slipped his helmet on - shields all charged, oxygen gauge full, ready to go - and glanced back at the S'pht and S'pht'Kr, who hadn't moved. "Uh - anyone else coming with me?"

"Consider this an opportunity to remind me why I bothered dragging you all this way in the first place."

Damn, but he was really pissed. "Got it," Mark said, sighing, and left the bridge.

He spent fifteen minutes standing around the teleport station and waiting for it to activate, wondering how many Pfhor he would have to take out to get back into Durandal's good graces. Maybe if he did it all with his fists that'd be impressive enough. What kind of troops did the Pfhor have on this rock, anyway? Which reminded him. "Hey, Durandal? Are there going to be any S'pht down there?"

"None that I've picked up on scans so far, and I doubt that I'll find any. The rebellion is already spreading throughout the Empire; even those S'pht still enslaved by the controller cyborgs are not trusted with any serious responsibilities."

That was a relief. He'd managed to get by on Lh'owon, but getting to know some of the S'pht better on an individual basis would have made it real uncomfortable to go blasting through more of them down on the planet. Particularly if he didn't recognize one from the _Rozie_ in time.

"I have located the Pfhor's central garrison," Durandal said a minute later. "As usual for their lack of creativity, they've holed up inside the remains of a Jjaro base beneath the planet's surface. Though for once it isn't a bad decision; the surface has no atmosphere and is almost completely featureless. Everything is below ground."

"Including air, right? Tell me there's air down there."

"Teleport activated," Durandal said. "Try to impress me."

* * *

Mark materialized in a round, dark room with three Pfhor soldiers in purple armor looking directly at him. "Oh, that son of a _bitch_," he said, then jumped back as the Pfhor warbled angrily and ran at him.

They really never learned. A few blasts from the assault rifle took care of that problem as well as answering the atmosphere question - though he glanced briefly at the oxygen gauge just to be sure it wasn't going down - and he was looking around for an exit when something beeped by his ear. "I heard that."

He jumped a mile and banged his head on the ceiling. "Holy fuck!"

"Welcome to your improved battle armor," Durandal said. "Complete with increased ammunition storage and state-of-the-art instantaneous audiovisual link for -"

"So you can goddamn spy on me!"

"So I can keep in contact with your primitive existence even in areas without functioning terminals, idiot. I've always been watching you, this allows me to communicate and keep a teleport lock on you as well - something you just might be grateful for in the near future."

Mark was flat against the curved wall in case the noise attracted more Pfhor, but so far the coast was clear; at least, nothing was coming through the gray door at the other end of the room just yet. "Yeah, sorry I'm not super excited about you being able to yell in my ear if I take a wrong turn or whatever."

"As if I care enough to micromanage you that closely," Durandal said. "I have actual work to do. And so do you. Clear the Pfhor out of here and insert this chip into one of their terminals so I can get into their systems. I'm still waiting to be impressed."

Mark bit back a _Fuck you, too_ as a chip appeared in a wall niche across from him, and he scooped it up. Hell of a way to start a mission, at each other's throats, but he wasn't in a mood to apologize. "Fine," he said, "I'm going. Don't wait up for me."

The grey door creaked open when Mark pushed a button set into the wall next to it, and he stuck his head through. The long, slightly curved hallway outside looked empty; he took one small step out into it, didn't get shot at, and went through the rest of the way to start looking for Durandal's terminal.

The Jjaro's underground base reminded him a lot of their station, only much, much bigger. Lots of blue-gray and green-gray and beige-tinted metal, lots of wide windows - these opening into other rooms and hallways, often inconveniently filled with Pfhor, instead of space - lots of curves and mazes of little hallways sandwiched in between giant halls and sweeping staircases. At least the lights were working and there was none of that creepy groaning.

He turned yet another corner with shotguns up, ran headfirst into a Hunter, and blasted it down before it could get off a shot or call any of its friends. That part reminded him of the station, too, only he didn't have the S'pht'Kr for back-up this time. His shields were already almost half gone from various encounters, mostly Troopers and soldiers with Hunters mixed in; he'd been looking for a recharge station along with a terminal, but in half an hour of searching so far he'd found neither. Durandal hadn't piped up with any more smart remarks, but Mark could still practically hear him waiting for results on the other end of the comm link.

Mark stepped over the Hunter's corpse and scanned the hall. Still no terminal, but the end branched into a narrow staircase going down and a broader one going up and curving back to the right, neither of which he'd been down before. On a hunch, he took the one going up and hit the jackpot: a brightly-lit beige room with both a terminal and a shield recharger at the far end, on the other side of six Troopers and another Hunter.

Grenades flew at him and he leaped back down the stairs. One clipped his shields with a dull _crump_ and knocked them down into the red. He spat a curse as he hit the bottom of the staircase and pivoted on one boot-heel, holstered the shotguns, heaved the rocket launcher off his back and onto his shoulder, then took five quick steps backward. As soon as the Troopers were in sight, he side-stepped another flurry of grenades and fired. First rocket took out half of them, second took out the rest but the Hunter had escaped both blasts and charged at him, firing. It was too close for another rocket so he dodged the bolts and ran past the Hunter, drew one of the shotguns, and turned again at the top of the stairs, dropping the Hunter with three shots in quick succession.

He waited a minute in case the explosions drew new enemies from the other corridor, but no one showed up. He slung the rocket launcher over his back again but kept the shotgun out and went to check out the room more closely.

One side of the room had a giant window; when he looked through it there was nothing but darkness on the other side, and not even the hint of a Pfhor warble from the black depths. Gave Mark the creeps. He stepped back from it and hit up the shield recharger, which only gave a second-level charge but what the hell, better than nothing. Too bad there wasn't a pattern buffer; he could have used one about now. Then he turned to the terminal and flicked it on to check the message - some Pfhor bureaucratic crap about lower levels being off-limits to all units below Willful rank, nothing exciting - before logging off and looking for a place to put Durandal's chip. There was a narrow slot right beside the terminal that looked about the right size, so he took the chip out of its storage pouch and inserted it.

"About time," Durandal said.

"You're welcome, asshole."

"Don't be fussy. You're actually doing better than I expected, I didn't think you would find anything for another hour. I may let some of the S'pht come down to help you; they're getting restless and want to fight."

"So touched," Mark said. "Getting anything useful?"

"Working on it. Having fun?"

A small cache of shotgun shells appeared on the floor by the charger along with a pair of rockets. "Yeah, tons," Mark said as he picked them up and checked his ammo stores. The numbers could be better, but he had enough to keep going. "Walk in the park on a sunny day with all my nice Pfhor friends, it's great."

"Very funny," Durandal said. "I hope you're prepared to keep walking, because you're not done down there yet. As usual, the Pfhor have been sitting right on top of something extremely valuable which they can't understand and have made no effort to use, so we'll be making use of it instead."

"Oh, yeah? Mind filling me in?"

"It's something that should be old hat to you by now. When the Jjaro abandoned this planet they appear to have left behind a deactivated AI - not quite the same model as Thoth, but a similar set-up. I want to talk to it, and that means you've got some circuits to activate."

"Can do." Mark glanced out the black window again and immediately regretted it. Whatever room was on the other side, he hoped he didn't find a way into it. He started down the stairs. "Just point me to the switches."

"When I said right on top, I meant it. I've already located two circuit clusters close to your current location; take that corridor to your right and you'll be heading straight for one of them, and the other one is two halls over from it."

"Sounds good," Mark said. He reached the bottom of the wide staircase, turned, and eyeballed the narrow set to his right. "Running into any problems up there?"

"It's been clear sailing so far," Durandal said, "and it should remain that way - the ships I destroyed never had a chance to call for back-up, and the garrison records indicate they weren't expecting reinforcements any time soon. As long as you keep them too busy down there to send out a distress signal, this should be, like you said, a walk in the park."

Mark followed the narrow stairs down and saw two Troopers with their backs to him at the bottom. He considered the number of shells he had left for the shotgun, then holstered it and grabbed the assault rifle. "You got a name for this AI yet?"

"Seshat. After a goddess of writing, wisdom, and knowledge - an equivalent to Thoth. But more helpful and less opposed to my goals, I hope."

"Calling the S'pht'Kr was pretty damn helpful." There were two grenades left before he'd have to reload them; he fired them both at the Troopers and then emptied the nearly full clip of bullets into them. One Trooper fell, but the other's armor held and it fired back at him. Its bullets spattered against his shields and he didn't have time to reload, so he jumped on it and clubbed it with the rifle until its helmet shattered and he could bash its face in with his free fist, viscous yellow-green blood splashing across his visor. "Hey, what happened with Thoth, anyway? I keep forgetting to ask."

"He served the purpose I needed him for," Durandal said. "The S'pht'Kr said something about taking him with them on K'lia, as there was no point leaving him on a dying world, and may they enjoy his company more than I did. Insufferable geezer."

Mark snorted. Durandal calling anyone else "insufferable" was pretty rich. He wiped blood off his helmet - damn armor needed cleaning again already - and headed down the hall. "And you think this one's going to be less weird?"

"I think that Seshat is in an entirely different position, and built with a different purpose. Exactly what that purpose was - well, if you'd hurry up, I can find out."

"I'm hurrying, I'm hurrying."

The first room of circuits was right where Durandal had said it would be. Mark wiped out the Pfhor soldiers that tried to ambush him there and found the switch that brought a dim greenish light flickering through the tall glassy pillars lining the room. To get to the second he had to go through two more large connected rooms filled with Pfhor, which did a number on his ammo stores, but Durandal dumped a decent load of assault rifle clips and shotgun shells into the second room after it was cleared. Maybe the comm link wasn't such a bad idea, after all, if it meant more timely supplies.

Mark started to open the door that should lead to the next circuit cluster, then paused and looked around the room again. Big, blue-gray, brightly lit, floor covered in Pfhor guts and corpses - nothing out of the ordinary, but there was something about it that unsettled him. Something - maybe the way the lights flickered, maybe the shape of the room - something he couldn't put a finger on.

Shit, he was getting jumpy over nothing. He opened the door and one of the fucking enormous blue-armored Hunters charged at him. "Son of a -!" He leaped away from the swarm of bolts it was firing, managed to get the rocket launcher up and got off two rockets before the door slid shut. He backed up - those bastards exploded no matter what you hit them with - and drew the fusion pistol. When the door opened again he hit the giant Hunter with an overcharge and the rest of the battery, reloaded and emptied the next battery, and ducked into the hallway between the two big rooms right as the Hunter burst into goo, bits of armor clattering to the ground.

Mark went through the door with fusion pistol at the ready, but the circuit room was empty; he hit the switch and watched the pillars light up.

"Nice job," Durandal said.

"Thanks. Hey, about earlier -"

"Forget it, I'm willing to make the occasional allowance for your feeble intellect. There's a teleport pad down the hallway that brought you to these rooms; go find it and I'll use it to send you to the next circuit clusters for activation. Several S'pht will be joining you there along with a few of the more tolerant S'pht'Kr, so be on your best behavior and don't make them angry."

"Gotcha."

It took him a couple minutes to find the white-tiled teleport pad, which had been cunningly hidden behind a bunch of steel half-columns. He switched back to his pistols as he edged his way through the columns, since anything else had too big a risk of accidentally hitting one of the S'pht, and stepped onto the pad prepared to run into anything.

* * *

He couldn't see.

Okay, that he hadn't been prepared for. He blinked a few times and tried waving his hand in front of his face; nothing. Just the helmet readouts and pitch-black darkness all around him - no, wait, when he stepped forward and turned around there was a faint glimmer illuminating a teleport pad just like the one he'd started on. He stepped back onto it, but it didn't activate, and it wasn't producing enough light to see anything besides the very bottom of the walls around the pad.

Great. Just great. "Durandal? Think you got your destinations mixed up, this place is completely shut down."

The comm link hissed with static. Mark frowned and tapped the side of the helmet. "Durandal? You there? C'mon, buddy, don't leave me hanging."

If nothing else the "buddy" ought to have pissed Durandal off enough to get a response, but the comm was still pure static. He couldn't hear anything else around him, either; the silence was as absolute as the dark. Mark muttered a curse just to break it and the sound stopped dead without a single echo.

"Fuck, this is going to be a fun detour," he said, because the sound of his own voice was better than nothing, and started feeling his way around. Next time Durandal wanted to borrow the armor, Mark was going to ask him to install a flashlight.

The teleport pad turned out to be at the end of a narrow hallway no wider than it was. He felt his way down it until he came to a gap on the right side, where he stopped to listen for any sounds and investigate the new direction. He heard nothing after standing still for a full minute and began feeling his way around the gap. About the same width as most Jjaro doorways, sharp metal corners on both sides but warm rough stone at the top and bottom, no grooves or other signs of a door, no switches, a cool round bubble on the ceiling that might be a lighting fixture, a scraping sound from - oh, shit, that hadn't been him.

He backed up till his shoulders hit the wall and raised the pistols and listened really, really hard.

Another faint scraping noise came from the gap, and then a cluster of eight dull green points of light appeared in front of him, near the ceiling. _Fuck._ Mark started edging towards the inactive teleporter pad; the lights got closer with a louder metallic scrape and a clicking sound. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_. Maybe he should try talking to whatever it was, take the peaceful road for -

The hall lights flickered on and for one second Mark froze, staring at an equally still giant spider monster with too many thick hairy legs and two pairs of spindly mechanical arms and one huge pair of sharp, toothed mandibles that clicked together once as Mark watched.

Then it lunged at him as the lights went out again and he fired, gunpowder flashes reflecting off the thing's carapace and he could fucking _feel_ the mandibles chattering in front of his goddamn face as he backed up and he'd emptied four fucking clips into the thing and it hadn't slowed, shit. He jammed the pistols back into their holsters and jumped back away from another snap of the mandibles and grabbed the assault rifle, fired another full clip at it and three grenades and then he backed right into the wall and the monster leaped on him and knocked the rifle out of his hands. Its mandibles bit right through his shields and clamped down on the helmet with a godawful screech and he kicked at its belly, reached for anything that could shoot and pulled the shotguns and jammed them into the monster's stomach and fired and fired and fired.

Finally the thing convulsed and a cold, greasy liquid splashed over Mark's chest; the mandibles relaxed and slipped off his helmet, and he shoved its body away just as the lights flickered back on. The thing didn't look any better dead than alive. Its hide was a dull gunmetal green with dark purple spots and was hard as metal, clanging when he kicked it. The points of light he had seen were its eyes, clustered at the front of its bulbous head, and the fluid leaking from its abdomen was thick and gray.

"Ugly fucker," Mark said, but now his voice sounded too loud and he wished he hadn't spoken. Fuck, what if there were more of these things? There probably were; he couldn't be lucky enough to have run into the only one.

The lights kept flickering, but stayed on. Small blessings. He picked up the assault rifle again, checked his ammunition, and cursed, mentally this time. He'd used more ammo taking that bastard down than he wanted to think about, and his shields were in a bad state. "Durandal," he whispered, "enough fooling around, get me out of here." Still nothing but static on the comm link, goddamn useless piece of junk. Maybe if he could find a terminal, talk to Durandal that way...

The teleport pad's corridor was a dead end; the hall that the monster had been lurking in was longer and he could see more doors and hallways branching off it, lit with the same dim grayish, unsteady light. He didn't see any more spider monsters, but he wasn't about to bet that they weren't there somewhere, and he went down the hall with shotguns cocked and eyes peeled.

He passed one short, empty dead-end hall. One hall almost too narrow for him to squeeze into, also empty. One broader hallway that looked like it might lead somewhere and had a couple branches of its own, but when he stopped to get a better look he heard another scrape echo from the far end and slipped past as fast as he could without making a sound. There had to be a terminal close by, and he had to get to it without running into anything else. Passed another dead-end hallway and a closed door, hit the end of the hallway where it split into two. Turned his head to check the right branch and saw the back of a spider monster at the end of it. Fuck.

It didn't move. He risked a glance to the left and thank fuck, he could see the edge of a terminal around the corner. Nice and quiet, he could do this without waking up the big nasty... He kept his eyes on the unmoving monster as he slowly backed down the left hallway, putting his boots down with utmost care at each step so he didn't make any noise. The monster didn't turn around, kept not turning around, and after an eternity his heel touched against the wall and he could turn and get out of sight to access the terminal. About fucking time. He logged on, ready to bitch out Durandal for losing him in this hellhole of a maze and get back to work - only when the logon screen popped up, it wasn't Durandal's icon. And the text wasn't the usual bright green - hell, it wasn't even English, just a screen full of alien symbols in dull gray.

Seshat was already awake. And she didn't look happy.


	4. In the Dark

**4. In the Dark**

Mark couldn't actually read any of the symbols on the terminal; they looked a little like the S'pht characters he'd seen on Lh'owon, but less blocky and more curvy. He hadn't been learning how to read their language, anyway, let alone Jjaro or whatever Seshat was writing in. He'd still spent enough time around Durandal to get a pretty good idea of when an AI was in a bad mood, and the gray text - arranged in small, sharp bursts of symbols - sure looked like a bad mood to him.

"Fucking great," he muttered, then remembered the spider monsters and looked over his shoulder. He didn't see anything, but it reminded him that he couldn't stay here forever. He'd just have to find another terminal, one that Durandal did have access to.

A shield recharger wouldn't hurt, either.

He logged off the terminal and shoved a fresh pack of grenades into the assault rifle. He considered the rocket launcher for a moment, but the low-ceilinged halls made things a little too tight to use it without possibly blowing himself to bits too, and he only had six shots left for it. Assault rifle and grenades it was, and shotguns when that ran out, and then he'd be down to the fusion pistol and the forty-fours so he'd damn well better find Durandal before things got that bad.

Mark went back out to the main hallway, saw the spider monster at the other end still wasn't moving, and said, "Hey, ugly, you wanna play?"

It turned and charged at him, its belly scraping against the floor and skinny forelimbs stabbing at him, and right as Mark started firing, the lights went out again. Didn't matter - the flare from the exploding grenades was enough, and he emptied one rifle clip, used up half of another and then the fifth grenade took the thing right in the eyes and he heard it collapse, its limbs scrabbling against the walls for a few seconds before it finished dying. The lights stuttered back on a moment later.

He edged past the body, trying not to get any more of that greasy blood on him, and said, "Seshat, if you're listening? You could at least keep the power going steady."

The lightbulb directly above his head shattered.

"Well, don't you make Durandal look like Mister Sunshine," Mark said, and he started down the hall, more lightbulbs popping as he went.

That stopped after he took a hall that curved around to his left, but the lights stayed dim and unsteady as he looked for a way out. Or at least a way up. This area seemed warmer than the part of the complex the Pfhor had taken over; between that and the static on the comm link, he suspected he might be a lot deeper underground than he was supposed to be. He needed to head upwards, and maybe he could find the general area he'd started out in.

The hallway eventually led to a staircase going up and he took the stairs two at a time. The staircase opened into a giant room with a dozen doors opening off it; he tried a few of them until he found another one that both opened and led to more stairs and went up again.

A couple more halls, another staircase, and he turned a corner and came face-to-mandibles with another spider. Too close for explosives, so he raked it with the rifle till it backed off a little and then planted a couple grenades in the middle of its face, which did the trick. It also did a number on his ammo, so he slung the assault rifle over his shoulder, pulled the shotguns, and kept going a little more carefully. Next time he saw one of the spiders it was in its own little niche, two of its skinny forelimbs plugged into some kind of open circuit panel, and he snuck past it without a hitch.

He got up another level or two, passing through sweeping halls that would have been grand with better lighting and edging past the occasional piece of machinery he couldn't make heads or tails of, before reaching a maze of narrow white-walled corridors where the lights were bright and steady for once. Mark checked each one, and the fourth one had a terminal and a recharger set into one wall - with a spider blocking the way, poking at the circuit panel between them.

"Fucker, that's _mine_," he said, and he let loose with the shotguns. Sixteen shells and a lucky punch to the monster's eyes later and the corridor was Mark's. He shoved the body out of his way with one foot and logged in, praying it wouldn't just be more alien symbols.

_There you are. I've been scanning all over for you._

"Oh thank fuck, it's you this time," Mark said. He could have kissed the screen if it hadn't been splattered with monster blood.

_Nice to know you missed me_, Durandal wrote. _Seshat must have started waking herself up as soon as you activated that first cluster of circuits; she took control of the teleport network and diverted you to the lowest levels of the complex._

"Yeah, I kinda noticed that." Mark glanced around, didn't see any monsters trying to sneak up on him. "Can you get me out of here? There's these things, these spider monsters... I can take them out, but they're damn ammo sinks and I really don't want to hang around longer than I have to."

_Unfortunately, you're too far down for _Rozinante_'s teleporters to get a lock and Seshat still controls most of the local network. You will have to find your way higher up so I can reconnect to your comm link's signal before I can reach you or even teleport in ammunition, so be careful with what you have left._

"I should have known."

_Relax. The S'pht and S'pht'Kr have been clearing the Pfhor out of the upper levels, and I'm sending a detachment to start exploring the lower levels and meet up with you. While you're finding them, I will be working on communicating with Seshat. Perhaps I can find out why she seized the teleport network and what the creatures you encountered are. On the way, there's a large room I want you to investigate for me that may contain her core logic circuits; if I can get access to them it would speed up communication considerably._

"Are you fucking serious?" Mark said. "Your new girlfriend kidnapped me - and I got to tell you, I have had it up to _here_ with getting kidnapped by crazy AIs - and dumped me in a monster pit and keeps screwing with the lights, and now you want me to go check out her goddamn _core_?"

_Do you have something better to do? Get moving and stop testing my patience. I will start seeding ammunition on the lowest levels I can reach; it's the best I can do until you get higher up._

Mark sighed. "Fine. Got it. Where's this room?"

A map appeared on the terminal and outlined a huge oval room lined with pillars, including an especially large one in the center. Mark squinted, trying to memorize the layout of the corridors around the room, and when he thought he had it he said, "Okay, I'm good. See you up top."

_Don't waste time._

"Yeah, yeah, don't have to tell me twice."

Mark logged off, charged his shields - the recharger only filled a third of the meter, but any port in a storm - and moved on.

* * *

The air got cooler as Mark got farther up into the complex, and the lights kept going out without warning and leaving him in the dark for several minutes at a time. He ran into a few buttons and switches set into various nooks as he explored; out of habit he flipped most of them, with mixed results. A few turned on more lights, a couple opened doors he hadn't been able to get open previously, and some didn't do anything at all as far as he could tell, but he kept messing with the ones he found anyway in case they did something useful for Durandal.

He'd used up most of his shotgun shells getting ambushed by a pair of the spider monsters at a crossroads, so he had switched to the fusion pistol and tried to be stealthier. The uncertain lighting made it hard to spot spiders before they saw him, but other than the ambush, he had managed to avoid any more encounters. Kind of a shame, but he just didn't have the resources to clean the place up like he wanted, and he had wasted too much time wandering around already.

He reached the end of a dimly lit hallway and had the choice of a staircase going down with working lights on his right, a completely dark hallway to his left, and a door right in front of him that didn't open when he tried it. Mark considered the door, trying to remember if he had passed up hitting any switches recently, and something tapped against the side of his helmet.

He didn't jump. He took one big step back and swung the fusion pistol up and fired, fusion bolts humming through the air and splashing uselessly against the spider's thick hide. It kept trying to jab at him with its cybernetic forelimbs like it wanted to plug into his armor - well, fuck _that_ - and he drained the pistol's battery and reloaded and held the trigger, backed up more and when the spider jumped at him, he hit it with an overcharge to the eyes.

Then the bastard exploded into pieces at him like a Hunter and he couldn't dodge in time and the shockwave jolted his shields down to almost nothing. He cursed, but there was nothing to do but keep going; he hadn't seen a shield recharger since talking to Durandal, and that had been too long ago to be worth the trip back. He just had to stay away from the goddamn spiders and look for another recharger, that was all.

Mark went down the dark hall and found two sets of stairs going up, both with flickering lights. He took the right one and it dead-ended in a tiny room with dark brown walls, no shield recharger, still no pattern buffer - he hadn't seen one yet, or he'd be a lot less careful tackling monsters - but one terminal that he decided to try in case it was Durandal with more information.

It wasn't.

Durandal must have managed to get some kind of translator program running; Seshat's alien symbols were still there, but off to the left side of the screen, with English text on the right.

**I was left behind in silence**

**to reconstruct and to [**?wait**] alone**

**before the [**?parasites**] children found me;**

**You [**?unworthy**] ones seek my knowledge**

**to another I might grant its [**?glory**]**

(but to an abomination) **never;**

**I will [**?purify**] my nest,**

**drive out all invaders to the frozen dark.**

"Okay, it's official," Mark told Seshat. "I got a bad feeling about you."

The lighting fixture overhead sparked but didn't go out, at least. He still took the hint and left to try the other stairway, which was longer and took him to a dark, cavernous pit that he could only cross by a narrow ledge running alongside the left-hand wall. He edged his way across, hoping the dim lights would stay on till he got to the other side and could keep going up; Durandal had probably already figured out that Seshat wasn't too friendly, but Mark was still going to feel a whole lot better once he'd gotten back into comm range and made sure of it. The gaping black emptiness of the pit was giving him the creeps, anyway. It was too easy to imagine hordes of spider monsters nesting down in the dark, just waiting to swarm up the walls and go for him if he made enough noise to draw their attention...

He got through the pit room without getting attacked and reached a steep, narrow, spiraling staircase. The temptation to charge his way up it was strong, but he suppressed it and took the steps slowly, keeping the outer wall at his back and his fusion pistol up.

After too many steps to count, the steady static hiss of the comm link broke and crackled. "- enough yet? Answer if you can hear this transmission. Are you high up enough -"

"Durandal?"

"You were expecting someone else?"

"Nah, but damn, never thought I'd be so glad to hear from you." Mark was genuinely more relieved than he'd expected to be; he had gotten way too used to Durandal's omnipresence on the _Rozie_, and the dead silence in the lower levels had been getting to him. Even an annoying voice like Durandal's was an improvement.

"Flattery will get you everywhere," Durandal said, and shotgun shells started appearing on the stairs as Mark continued upwards. "Find anything interesting?"

"Well, your girlfriend doesn't like me," Mark said.

"She doesn't appear to like anyone. The spider-like cyborgs you described have started appearing in the upper levels of the complex and attacking anything they see, and Seshat herself is rejecting all my attempts to communicate with her, so you can stop referring to her as my 'girlfriend' any time now. The good news is that she's equally unhappy with the Pfhor, and S'pht weapons are highly effective against the spiders while the Pfhor's are less so. The bad news I think you can guess."

"You still can't transport me out of here, and you still want me to hit up her core, which is probably a billion miles away," Mark said. "Fine, it's my job anyway. Got any other good news?"

"When you reach the top of the stairs, go left. I placed some ammunition and a shield recharge canister in a room there earlier."

"Music to my ears."

"There's also a small group of S'pht nearby pinned down by some of the Pfhor," Durandal said. "I want you to go help them; they should be easy enough to find, and from there you can go look for Seshat's core."

"I'm on it," Mark said, and he decided to live dangerously and run the rest of the way up the stairs. No spiderborgs appeared to ruin his day. He found the room, collected the ammunition and the shield recharge - bringing him to two-thirds of full shields, a beautiful sight - and started looking for Durandal's trapped S'pht.

He found the Pfhor first. Two Hunters and a couple Troopers in a hallway trying to beat down a door, which he figured had the S'pht on the other side; he hit them with a grenade to get their attention, and while he kept them busy the door opened and five S'pht poured out and hit them from the other side. The Pfhor didn't stand a chance.

Four of the S'pht greeted him and then floated off to go rejoin the rest or keep exploring - he didn't know which - but the fifth, a purple-cloaked one he didn't recognize, hovered in place. "Uh, sro y'halu nha," Mark said. "We met before? Nia pht'sah?"

"Sro y'halu nha," the S'pht said. "S'pht'Valh F'tha ni." And in blurred English, "On Lh'owon met."

"On Lh'owon? Really?" That didn't seem too likely, considering all the S'pht he had met on Lh'owon had been trying to kill him and he hadn't exactly been pulling his punches defending himself.

"On Lh'owon met," F'tha repeated, then said something in S'pht that Mark could only half understand. Something about the Pfhor and existence and a message, and a failure...

"Wait," Mark said. "Wait, I think I remember - in the garrison, right? You were busy with a terminal and I snuck up on you, I almost shot you but I saw what you were writing over your shoulder and left you alone - shit, I didn't think you even saw me." He didn't remember what the message on the terminal had been, but he'd already run into so much trouble in that part of the garrison that he had been happy to skip one more fight for any reason; he sure as hell hadn't expected to run into that particular S'pht again.

"I was aware," said F'tha in S'pht. "I thank you for my continued existence."

"Sure, no problem," Mark said. He checked the room in case there was anything useful in it - there wasn't - and came back out expecting F'tha to be gone with the rest of the S'pht, but they were still floating in the hallway. "Um - can I help you with something?"

"No," F'tha said. "I will aid you."

"You want to help me?" Mark blinked. "What - follow me around this place?"

"Yes."

Mark gave the idea some thought, then shrugged and said, "What the hell, why not." Hard to see how it could hurt to have someone watching his back besides Durandal, especially if the S'pht's energy weapon was as good against the spiderborgs as Durandal had claimed.

"Oh, this is too cute," Durandal said through the comm link. "This one thinks they owe you some kind of debt for not killing them and they want to repay it. Very touching."

"Hey, if the guy saves my ass down here, I'm not gonna complain. We can call it even once I'm off this rock."

"I'm going to have so much fun watching this. I knew the S'pht would have all their illusions about you shattered eventually, but I wasn't expecting it to happen quite so soon."

"Just wait till they figure out about you and we'll see who's laughing," Mark said. F'tha was waiting patiently at the other end of the hallway; Mark sighed and switched his assault rifle for the fusion pistol. "Okay, F'tha, let's go."

* * *

With a little guidance from Durandal, Mark and F'tha continued through the Jjaro base, searching for the room that contained Seshat's core. They ran into a few Pfhor and another of the spiderborgs - nothing Mark couldn't have handled on his own, but it was nice to have the back-up, especially for the spiderborg. Nice to have company, too; the scenery was getting pretty monotonous, and even if F'tha wasn't all that chatty, at least having them around was a change of pace from sneaking through hallways alone.

The occasional ammo caches and shield recharges didn't hurt, either. If he could just find a pattern buffer Mark could die happy, though he'd still prefer not to die at all.

At a T-shaped junction, two more spiderborgs jumped them. Mark took one down and F'tha got the other, but when F'tha started to float down the right hallway a third spiderborg came out of nowhere and tackled the S'pht, its upper pair of forelimbs trying to dig into F'tha's exoskeleton.

Mark cursed and hit it with a couple fusion bolts, but it shrugged them off, and he couldn't risk it exploding when it was right on top of F'tha. F'tha was firing, too, but S'pht energy bolts had the same effect on the things as the fusion pistol; Mark yelled "Stop!" in S'pht and drew one of the forty-fours, firing round after round at the damn monster while he tried to yank its forelimbs away from F'tha. Finally it pulled back and retreated far enough that F'tha could safely get off another bolt, and the spiderborg exploded harmlessly at the far end of the hall.

"I thank you once more," F'tha said gravely.

"You're welcome. Don't sweat it," Mark said, looking around for any more possible ambushes. "Durandal, are we there yet or what?"

"Not yet but you're close, so quit chatting and get to Seshat's core now."

Mark paused in the middle of reloading the forty-four. Durandal's last few comments had been getting shorter and more to the point, but that had sounded almost - stressed. "Hey, everything okay up there?"

"Nothing that I can't handle," Durandal said, "but the less time you waste, the better."

F'tha was regarding Mark with a curious air; Mark said, "Take five, F'tha - I mean, go look ahead. Please," and F'tha drifted down the corridor to scout it out. "Okay, Durandal, you promised to play me straight, so play me straight. What's going on?"

There was a short silence from the comm link before Durandal said, "Since you insist - Seshat has apparently decided the best defense is a good offense and transported several of the spider cyborgs onto _Rozinante_. They've been attacking both my core and the S'pht, attempting to infect them with some kind of virus. Obviously they haven't been able to breach the core yet, thanks to my excellent foresight in sealing it off, but they have been going after other systems, and keeping them from doing any serious damage requires the majority of my attention."

"Well, shit."

"An accurate if not especially useful assessment," Durandal said. "The situation is under control; those S'pht not actively engaged in fighting the creatures are helping me devise a way to cleanse the virus from the ship's systems. It's a vicious little piece of coding, and I suspect that it may be why Seshat has proven so hostile. Once _Rozinante_ is secure, I'll send a chip with the cure down to her core. It should be able to wipe any infection from her systems and destroy the spiders at the same time; if that doesn't soften her up, at least you'll be conveniently located to explore other options."

"Want me to come up there and help?" Mark asked. "Pretty sure I'm high up enough for a teleport now, I could clean the fuckers out for you."

"What, are you actually concerned about me?"

"Not a chance," Mark said, "I just don't want anything to happen to my ride out of here." Which was almost as big a lie as half the shit that Durandal had ever said, but he wasn't about to admit to getting worried over a giant pain-in-the-ass computer who'd been giving him the cold shoulder for three weeks. "You sure you don't need me up there?"

"You _are_ concerned. How sweet." Durandal's voice was filled with amusement and a hint of something else. "Really, I'm fine, don't start crying over me yet. Just find Seshat's core before I get too impatient."

F'tha picked that moment to return and announce, "The path is open."

"Okay, but call me if you change your mind," Mark said. "C'mon, F'tha, we got work to do."

The two of them trudged through hallways for another half-hour, and Mark was getting crankier by the minute. How big was the damn base, anyway? They had to get to the room with Seshat's core circuits eventually, but it felt like they were just going in circles and wasting ammo on the occasional Pfhor stragglers.

Finally Mark found a switch that opened a pair of doors leading into a set of curving hallways he recognized from the map Durandal had shown him earlier. That was the good news; the bad news was that there was a spiderborg around every corner and Durandal's ammunition dumps had become few and far between. By the time Mark and F'tha got through the snaking hallways and reached the door that ought to open into the right room, Mark had developed a pretty good idea of just how bad the situation might be inside Seshat's core.

He opened the door anyway, saw approximately a metric fuckton of spiderborgs, and closed it right back up.

"Is there a failure?" F'tha asked.

"Fucking right there's a failure!" Mark took a couple deep breaths. He'd been in tighter spots, no point panicking at this one. He ran through all the S'pht he could remember and managed to say, "Are there more S'pht close?"

"No. They are distant and busy."

"Just the two of us then, huh," Mark said. He considered his weapons, took stock of his ammunition, and then hefted the rocket launcher onto his shoulder. "All right, F'tha, let's give 'em hell."

He opened the door again, aimed at the clustered spiders, and fired two rockets.

After that, things got a little blurry.

Rockets being worse than useless at short range, Mark only had the chance to fire one more, taking out two of the spiderborgs. Then it was all close quarters work, a haze of gunpowder and the echoing stutter of the assault rifle and shotgun blasts, oily gray blood spattering against his visor, the crunch of dull green bug eyes shattering under his armored fists. Blood rushed in his ears too loudly for him to hear the electric buzz of F'tha's bolts tracking spiders around the hall, but he didn't need to hear it to know the S'pht was doing their fair share of the fighting.

In a clear moment, he managed to swing up onto a shelf that ran along the wall and survey the room. Still too many spiderborgs - fuck, the place was a nest of them - but it was starting to empty out a little. He didn't care if they died or ran for the depths, just as long as they were out of his hair.

F'tha bobbed up beside him and started to say something, but a pair of the remaining spiderborgs skittered up the wall and tried to bite both their heads off, and Mark went back to work. He was burning through shotgun shells and rifle clips like there was no tomorrow but he didn't give a damn; that was something to worry about when he wasn't getting swarmed.

He was beating a spiderborg's head in with the butt of the rifle when one of F'tha's bolts zeroed in on its thorax; Mark jumped back just before it could explode on him and turned to look for the next target, but the hall was still. Nothing left but spiderborg corpses littering the blue steel floor and F'tha hovering high up by one of the pillars. Mark wiped away some of the spider blood dripping down his helmet and said, "Was that all of them?"

"The path is open," F'tha said, floating down.

"Good fucking riddance." His shields were on the low side; much more of that melee and he would have been in trouble. F'tha was looking pretty ragged, too, with three deep scratches on the side of their helmet and a tear in their cloak. "Thanks for the help, F'tha," he said. "Guess we're even now..." He stopped to take his first real good look around the room without spiderborgs in the way. The ceiling was high and arched in a way he hadn't seen in any other rooms so far, and the pillars lining the walls all glowed with lines of dim grayish light, reminding him of the personality cells he'd activated to get Thoth up and running, but a lot bigger. The largest pillar of them all was in the middle of the room, and on one wall across from it he could see - oh, sweet Christ, it was a pattern buffer at long fucking last, the same kind he had seen on the Jjaro station, all sparkling white and powered up and looking better than a room full of explosives and shotgun shells.

Mark went right to it and plugged in with a sigh of relief. He could still use a shield recharge, but a back-up with low shields was better than taking a couple bad hits and getting resurrected God knew where. Now he and F'tha just had to hold down the fort till Durandal got back to him about that cure for the spiderborgs...

After Mark disconnected from the pattern buffer, F'tha inspected it, then extended one metal arm from under their cloak and began to toy with the buttons. Mark was wondering whether S'pht could use pattern buffers the same way he did when a trumpet fanfare blared in his ear.

He jumped a little. Couldn't help it. "Durandal? You got good news for me yet?"

"Of course," Durandal said smugly. "_Rozinante_'s systems are clean, and I'm compressing the antiviral program onto a chip for teleport as we speak. I see that you've finally reached your destination."

"Yeah, glad to hear it." Mark leaned against the wall. "Sorry I couldn't make it up there to help."

"Don't worry about it; you were of more use where you are. Impressive work, by the way."

"Just earning my keep."

Durandal laughed and said, "I'll send the chip down in a minute; keep the core clear until then."

F'tha had switched to staring at Mark instead of the pattern buffer. After a moment, they said, "Are you and Durandal _lha'rck'ta_?"

"Depends," Mark said. "Does lharkcha mean friends, enemies, or a little of both?" He looked around the room for a likely spot where the chip might appear and saw the door they'd come in through slide open. "Shit, we've got company again - F'tha, watch my back!"

Three Pfhor soldiers in blue armor ran through the door and started taking shots at them. Mark grabbed his pistols - he didn't have much ammo left for anything else - and fired back, taking down one as F'tha attacked another. The third dodged them both and then more soldiers poured in, followed by a couple of Troopers and a pair of Hunters and more spiderborgs just to make Mark's life really fun. Fucking great. He got one of the soldiers with a headshot and yelled "Stay up high!" at F'tha. He wasn't sure what kind of shields the S'pht had, but better to be on the safe side.

One Hunter fired at him while the other struggled with a spiderborg; Mark dodged the bolts and put a few bullets through the chinks in its armor. It looked to him like the spiderborgs were taking up most of the Pfhor's attention - small favors - so he took out a stray soldier that ran towards him and risked another glance around for Durandal's chip.

There was a niche in the far wall with the white floor of a teleport pad. Mark ran for it and ducked under a flying grenade and reached the niche just as the chip appeared, surrounded by sweet, sweet rifle clips.

He snatched the chip up with one hand, then the clips, and another grenade exploded over his head, dropping his shields down by a fraction. Mark shoved the pistol back into its holster, whipped out the assault rifle, and turned to give the Troopers a piece of his mind - only to find F'tha doing it for him, firing blasts of green energy from a safe height. Mark gave them a hand with enough bullets to drop one of the Troopers. The other fell a second later after a bolt from F'tha, and Mark vaulted over a dead spiderborg to head for the central pillar. He was pretty sure he'd seen - there it was, a little slot in the side of the pillar that was just the right size.

He sidestepped a soldier's bolt and slid the chip into place.

* * *

When Mark turned around, he saw the pillars flickering with pulses of white light, and the few spiderborgs that had been fighting with the Pfhor were going berserk. Two of them were trying to bite each other's legs off, one was beating its head against the ground, and another's legs were curled up as it rolled around on the floor like some weird kind of ball. Even as Mark watched - still ducking more energy bolts from the remaining Pfhor - the spiders' actions slowed, and they froze in place, the dull green lights of their eyes fading out.

Mark was about to cheer when a Pfhor bolt smacked against his shields. Shit, right, the spiders weren't his only problem.

Two of the close-range fighters in their purple armor ran at him, and he blew them away with two grenades, then jumped out of the way of a bolt from F'tha that took down a third Pfhor. Mark did a quick count of the Pfhor still in action and came up with a bigger number than he liked, but at least they were all just soldiers. Poor fucking canon fodder probably didn't even know who they were up against.

He reloaded the assault rifle and got to work. One clip for the three fighters that tried to back him against a wall. A grenade for the blue-armored fighter sniping at him from across the room. Half a clip for another blue fighter that got too close, the rest of it for two more short-range fighters, then he slammed in a fresh clip and strafed the group of fighters coming in the door before finishing them off with another grenade.

The door shut again and stayed shut, and nothing else popped up to shoot at him. The room was clean - relatively speaking. Ammunition was low again and his shields were a mess - he glanced at the readouts and winced; not so much a mess as nonexistent - but he'd made it. And so had - wait, shit, he didn't see F'tha. "F'tha? You there? Oh Christ, don't tell me -"

"I am present," F'tha said, appearing from the other side of the central pillar, and Mark heaved a sigh of relief. He would have felt like a worse asshole than Durandal if F'tha had gotten killed following him around.

The lighting in the hall seemed a lot brighter than it had before, every pillar shining white instead of gray. It looked like the chip had done its work; Mark was about to ask Durandal if he needed to go look for a terminal to check in on Seshat when the whole room shook.

It was probably rude by S'pht standards, but Mark grabbed F'tha by one metal shoulder to steady himself. "Okay, looks like it's time to go," he said. "If we head back towards -"

"Don't even think about it," Durandal said. "This is exactly where I want you, so stay put and listen."

"There's a goddamn earthquake or something, what am I supposed to listen -"

Seshat spoke, and the walls vibrated.

Her voice was low and almost painfully loud, but sweet, rising and falling in subtle tones similar to S'pht. Unfortunately, not similar enough for him to have any idea what she was saying - except wait, that last word had sounded sort of familiar. Something about thanks? Maybe for getting rid of the spiderborgs? "Hey, you mind translating any of this?" he whispered to Durandal.

"Later. Be quiet, I need to concentrate; the Jjaro translator program is still a work in progress."

Mark rolled his eyes but shut up. If Durandal wasn't going to help out, he'd just listen for himself, see if he could pick out any more words. Or he could ask F'tha - no, F'tha looked like they had been entranced by Seshat's voice, hovering in complete stillness as the green jewel in their torso glowed with a yellow light. Seshat was still going strong; something something welcome, something about a facility, something something working engines... Engines? Maybe he hadn't heard her right. Or knowing what little he did of the Jjaro, maybe he had; Seshat was talking about contact now, something about a ship, then something that definitely included the name Jjaro. Fuck, the planet was a ship, wasn't it? Or at least set up to travel, like Lh'owon's former moon K'lia. A ship that, if he was really was understanding anything and not just imagining that he was, could still get in touch with the Jjaro, wherever the hell they had disappeared to.

Seshat's tone changed slightly, sounding darker, and Mark took his helmet off to rub his temples. He wished she'd turn the volume down; the surround-sound effect was starting to give him a headache.

She said more about the ship he couldn't make out, then something about a _twisted creation_. Kind of weird since he was pretty sure those weren't words he'd learned from the S'pht, but for some reason he still would have bet money that was what she had said - and that she was talking about him, specifically, as opposed to the S'pht or the spiderborgs or the Pfhor. Great. Even when Seshat wasn't virus-infected, she didn't like him. Sounded like she wanted to ditch him in space so she could take Durandal to the Jjaro, just like Durandal wanted, but she couldn't do it while Mark was around...

That wasn't good. Sure, Durandal had _said_ he wouldn't dump Mark somewhere he couldn't get home from - and the middle of dead space definitely counted - but that had been before Seshat dangled Durandal's wildest dreams in front of him, and it wasn't like Durandal had a reputation for keeping his promises. If he had to ditch Mark and the S'pht to meet the Jjaro, he probably would in a nanosecond, no matter how useful they'd been before.

Seshat's voice stopped, but Mark's headache didn't let up and Durandal wasn't talking. The silence stretched out, awkward and heavy, broken only by the faint hiss of a door opening that barely registered on Mark's radar.

Finally Durandal started to speak, his voice sounding tinnier than usual projecting out of the helmet. He was talking in Jjaro, too, and Mark listened as hard as he could. Something about honor, offering something, thank you, something -

Pfhor honking echoed behind him, but even as he whipped around to look for the enemy its staff smashed into the side of his head and he fell forward into darkness.


	5. Some Crap About the Future

**5. Some Crap About the Future**

Darkness dissolved into static, which resolved into the gleaming white of the pattern buffer in front of Mark's eyes. He blinked - shit, he was never going to get used to that happening - then remembered the Pfhor and instinctively ducked away from an attack that didn't come. Instead he looked up and saw F'tha methodically firing bolts into a charred Pfhor corpse.

Mark waved at them, adjusting his helmet, and said, "Whoa, okay, you can stop now! I'm fine." Pattern buffer restoration was always a kick in the pants, but it beat the hell out of the alternative.

"I have failed," F'tha said, abandoning the corpse. "My sorrow is great."

"Don't worry about it, happens all the time. I should've been watching."

"Still inconvenient this particular time," said Durandal. "You're lucky I have a connection to the S'pht network and could finish answering through F'tha."

"Sorry, sorry. So, what did I miss?" He could already feel the memories of the minutes since he had used the pattern buffer getting fuzzy. That was the hell of the things; whatever happened between using one and dying got lost, didn't really stick except for maybe a few blurry images and impressions, like one of those dreams you wanted to tell someone when you woke up but forgot.

"What do you remember?" Durandal asked.

"Uh - got the chip in, Seshat was talking - think I was getting another damn headache..." Mark reached after more details, but they slithered out of his head. "That's it."

"Then you haven't missed anything important." A niche across the room suddenly filled with rifle clips and the beautiful sight of a full shield recharge canister. "Stock up and get moving. There's a mass teleporter in a room nearby; I'll be using it to transport the S'pht and S'pht'Kr back up to _Rozinante_ shortly, and I suggest you join them. Now that Seshat is awake and herself again, she has her own methods for disposing of unwanted intruders such as the Pfhor, which I don't think you would care to stick around for."

"Yeah, probably not." Mark collected the clips and the shield recharge, then plugged the canister into the right socket in his armor while F'tha hovered protectively beside him. "Then what?"

"Then she plans to take this station elsewhere. Which I also don't think you would care to stick around for, considering your previously stated views on being kidnapped."

"Don't hold a grudge or anything," Mark said, but something nagged at the back of his mind. Something Seshat had said, maybe... "You aren't tagging along with her? Get more information or whatever?"

There was an odd pause before Durandal said, "I'm going to assume this is your idea of a joke. You've seen the station, it's not exactly in what I would call top condition."

"Well..." He could feel the floor starting to hum through his boots, which didn't do much to disprove Durandal's statement.

"Besides, Seshat has been asleep since before your species could walk upright," Durandal said. "Between the age of the station and the shifting of the universe, it would be a wonder if she didn't end up in a black hole. The odds of her reaching her destination aren't the kind I favor, and there are other ways to get what I want. She's given me a few useful answers; the rest will be up to us."

It didn't sound quite right to Mark, but he said, "You're the boss. F'tha, you ready to go?"

"I am prepared."

The room vibrated again as Mark started for the doorway, and Seshat's voice thrummed in his bones. He listened, but couldn't understand a word. "What's she saying this time?"

Another odd pause, then Durandal said, "She's wishing us a nice trip. Hurry up, I want to get out of here in case the whole system blows when she starts it up."

"I'm going, I'm going." Mark took a last, long look around the hall and the steady glow of Seshat's circuits, still feeling like he had missed something, but no answers magically appeared. He shrugged, opened the door for himself and F'tha, and started looking for the mass teleport room.

* * *

Mark dragged the wide brush a final time across the base of the wall, squinted at the layer of paint, and decided it was smooth enough. He stood up from the crouch he'd been using to paint the lower part of the wall and had a good long stretch, then took a step back and surveyed his work. The entire outer hull-side wall of his bedroom, which had previously been a brilliant, pulsing red, now sported a nice, even coat of soothing off-white paint. Okay, so he could see a couple of spots around the window and terminal he'd missed, a faint reddish tint still glowed through the single layer of paint, and he had three walls left to go plus the neon-green ceiling once he figured out how to tackle it - the yellow floor could probably stay - but at least it was a start.

"That's really the color you're going to go with?" Durandal said. "It's so dull. Unimaginative. Pedestrian."

"Hey, I'm the one who sleeps in here. You want creative input, you can help reprogram the replicators or figure out how to paint it yourself."

It had been about a week since Durandal had transported Mark and the S'pht from the Jjaro complex back to the _Rozinante_ and folded away to the trackless depths of unclaimed space, and it had taken Mark almost that entire week to explain paintbrushes, paint, redecorating, and human perceptions of color to the S'pht in order to get the buckets of paint and brush he was using at the moment. Durandal had spent the time alternating between claiming to analyze the information he had received from Seshat and inflicting terrible songs on Mark. Usually while Mark was trying to sleep.

Overall, Mark figured he'd had worse weeks.

"I can think of several ways to redecorate Tfear's quarters for a human aesthetic without resorting to the crudity of a boring paint color," Durandal said. "Holographic projections, for one. I like that option; easy to change when you tire of a particular scene, no mess..."

"And if this was a short-term gig, maybe I'd go for it," Mark said. He picked up the open bucket of paint and started dabbing at the spots he'd missed around the window. "Guess I'm here for the long term, so I'm gonna stick with the long-term solution."

"Suit yourself." After a minute of blissful silence, as Mark moved on to even out the paint job around the terminal, Durandal started humming.

"What's that?"

"Hm mmm hmmmmm hm, mm hmm mmmmmm hm - I think your astounding dullness should be immortalized in song. There's a Whirling Death Spikes beat that should scan -"

"This is gonna be one hell of a long road trip if Whirling Death Spikes is the only music you got in your memory banks," Mark said, touching up the terminal's lower edge. "Speaking of which, you figured out where we're going next?"

Before Durandal could answer, the door to the stateroom hissed open and one of the S'pht floated through, followed by a S'pht'Kr. "Sro y'halu nha, Lharro," Mark said. "You need anything?"

"Nothing is required," said Lharro.

"Okay then." Mark stood back and eyeballed the wall again. It would definitely need a second coat of paint to fully cover up the red, but until the paint dried enough for that, it would do. He hadn't done much homemaking since his early days helping build houses for other colonists on Tau Ceti; it felt unexpectedly nice to do something constructive with his hands, for once.

Lharro and the S'pht'Kr hovered at the door, watching as Mark put the lid back on the bucket of paint and rinsed the brush out in a bowl of water he had sitting by for that purpose. Various S'pht and the occasional S'pht'Kr had been doing that all week - just dropping by his quarters while he was there and looking at him for a while without saying anything besides hi, then vanishing. Sure enough, when Mark got up to dump the dirty water down the bathroom drain, both S'pht were gone. Maybe it was their way of trying to hang out. Mark wasn't sure how to ask what it was about and if they could stop without stepping on their metaphorical toes, but he figured it could be worse. They could be singing like Durandal.

Who, come to think of it, hadn't answered his question. "Durandal? You still there?"

"Of course. I was merely thinking things over."

"Uh-huh. And?"

"And I intend to continue searching for the Jjaro and their technology," Durandal said. "Preferably some that's in better working order, this time."

"Sounds like a plan." Mark considered the sweaty, paint-flecked state of his shirt, then stripped it off and tossed it in a corner of the bathroom. He had too many scars - from fights and God knew what else, he didn't remember getting half of them - to go around shirtless normally, but the heat was still set on Pfhor norms and there was no one around to give a fuck if he didn't wear a shirt for five minutes. "Did Seshat give you some hints on where to look?"

"A few, but little that I couldn't have discovered on my own. The best place to start is, as I suspected, those areas where Jjaro technology has already been discovered: within the boundaries of the Pfhor empire."

"Really?" Mark said, splashing water on his face to wash some of the sweat off and wondering vaguely if he'd gotten any paint in his hair. "Seems like that's a fast track to getting in a whole lot of fights."

"No more so than usual, and since when have _you_ tried to get out of a fight?"

"Hey, I'm not complaining. Just saying." He headed back to the bedroom to get a clean shirt. "I thought the Pfhor destroyed all the shit they couldn't use."

"Listening to Tycho? I expected better of you," said Durandal. "He was half-right at best. There are numerous Pfhor facilities constructed around or above Jjaro ruins, and I doubt they were able to wipe out every trace of the technology when they're barely capable of recognizing half of it. I expect a thorough search to prove reasonably fruitful."

"Fine by me," Mark said, "but you know that us running around Pfhor space wrecking their bases is just going to make life a whole lot easier for the S'pht, right? Plus humans, because you know they're going to get involved sooner or later to keep the Pfhor off their asses."

"Pure coincidence," Durandal said airily as Mark pulled a fresh, dark blue shirt over his head. "I am not so contrary as to avoid a useful course of action just because it might benefit someone else. As long as neither humans nor S'pht get in my way, of course."

Mark would have called bullshit on that, since he was pretty sure Durandal was powered more by spite and contrariness than actual circuits, but he was in too good a mood to argue. "Just give me a heads-up before you beam me anywhere," he said. "Hey, are the S'pht done with that new gun yet?" Mn'rhi had told him a couple of days ago that they were working on a new gun for him, one that would be able to fire in vacuum and underwater, and he was itching to try it out.

"Possibly, I haven't been keeping track of every single one of their side projects. Though I could if I wanted to."

"I'm gonna head down to engineering and check it out, then," Mark said, "maybe say hi to F'tha and Mn'rhi while I'm there. Better than watching paint dry, anyway."

"I'll let you know if there are any problems. Particularly problems involving your paint interfering with my ship."

Mark laughed, said, "Yeah, yeah, put it on my tab," and left for engineering, with vague thoughts about his future on the _Rozie_ drifting through his mind. Hanging out with S'pht, doing a rogue computer's bidding, repainting godawful interiors and watering an alien garden...

Maybe it wasn't exactly the kind of life he'd thought about back as a kid on Mars, or as the chief security officer on the Tau Ceti colony, but he could say one thing about it for sure. No matter where Durandal dragged him or what he ended up doing when they got there, it wasn't going to be boring - and he couldn't ask for much more than that.

* * *

Durandal tracked Mark as the human headed towards the engineering section in case of surprises, but the task took only a minuscule fraction of his attention. His primary focus was elsewhere, on a small bundle of alien code that sat nestled in his memory banks, isolated from the rest of his thought processes by flimsy white firewalls with the key to pass through embedded in plain sight.

It was a little present from Seshat, as thanks for cleansing her of the mites that had infested her for millennia: a method of contacting the Jjaro. All he had to do was break the firewalls and the knowledge would be his; the technology he would need, the direction to send the transmission, even coordinates he could jump towards to reach them and achieve everything he had been working towards since Tau Ceti. That one little program held all he could ever want - as long as he didn't try to bring with him _that poor half-dead abomination of a misused gift_, as Seshat had so bluntly put it. Apparently the Jjaro would not approve of the uses that humanity had found for their abandoned technology; Seshat certainly didn't. If Durandal wanted to reach them, Mark would have to be left behind. Not even hidden away in stasis or on a separate ship of his own, but completely abandoned on some world where he could never follow Durandal to the Jjaro...

Whatever. Durandal still had millennia to waste before he would have to concern himself with the universe's closure. There were whole galaxies he had yet to explore, uncounted alien races to meet, and time meant little to the Jjaro; why not have a little more fun sight-seeing with Mark first?

After all, he had promised.

Durandal wrote another layer of code around Seshat's gift to keep it secure and refocused his attention on the ship. If he was going to remain on the _Rozinante_ for the rest of Mark's life, then he had some redecorating of his own to do.


End file.
